The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

8.4. The BI Application Development Process

In this section, we describe the process of developing BI applications. The discussion centers on developing the standard reports that make up the majority of BI applications. The process for more complex analytic applications is essentially the same, with more work in the application development phase.

As you saw in Figure 8.1, the Lifecycle divides the overall application development process down into two steps: Specification and Development. We separate the steps because of their dependencies on other sections of the Lifecycle. The Specification step needs to happen as soon as possible after the requirements definition process is complete, before you forget the details. On the other hand, the Development step cannot begin until the other two tracks are mostly complete. You cannot start application development until you have determined your front-end tool strategy and selected a tool. You also need to have data available, so the data modeling and most of the ETL work need to be completed. If you're sourcing reports from Analysis Services, that database should be designed and deployed. Since the two BI application steps are so separated in time, it's easiest to manage them as separate steps in the process.

8.4.1. Application Specification

The goal of the specification step is to capture what you learned about BI application needs during the requirements definition process in a way that can be quickly turned into real applications once ...