Warning: Your KPIs Are Held Together With AGGR Spells!

If one developer leaving can break your dashboards, the dashboards were never stable.

Author

Glenda Carnate
December 12, 2025

Read time: 2.5 minutes

“Redo the KPIs. The Qlik dev quit.” And just like that, you’re reverse-engineering AGGR expressions that read like encrypted spells.

A director told me last month that the second their Qlik expert resigned, the entire analytics pipeline went into cardiac arrest.

KPIs flipped. Charts misbehaved. And AGGR() formulas began revealing themselves like mystical runes... nested inside nested inside why would anyone do this?

Suddenly, “self-service analytics” felt more like “self-service archeology.”

Because nothing exposes technical debt faster than losing the one person who understood the logic.

How to Rebuild KPIs Without Needing a Qlik Shaman?

1. Convert AGGR logic into plain-language definitions first.
Write the KPI like this:
“This metric shows X for Y broken down by Z.”
If the definition isn’t clear, the AGGR won’t be either.

2. Unnest the AGGR one layer at a time.
Start with the inner expression.
Then the grouping.
Then the outer filter.
Do not decode the entire spellbook at once.

3. Replace legacy expressions with modular, reusable logic.
Reusable variables > copy-pasted AGGR chaos.
Reduce the number of places where business logic can hide.

4. Validate KPIs with the business, not the old formulas.
The goal is correctness, not faithfulness to whoever built it last.

5. Document the rebuilt KPIs like someone else will own them next week. Because they might.

💡Key Takeaway: 

If your dashboards break when one Qlik dev leaves, you don’t have a BI system... you have a dependency disguised as a workflow.

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