Effective Test Data Management strategies reduce and prevent costly application problems. These issues can occur during a number of stages such as acquiring, provisioning, masking, and transferring test data from one environment to another.
A mature TDM strategy automates processes such as scripting, cloning, and provisioning to improve speed and efficiency. It also leverages obfuscation to keep data privacy in check.
Reusability
Test data management is important to ensure products function correctly during the development process and reduce product time-to-market. It’s also a key factor in data privacy compliance.
One of the biggest challenges in test data management is ensuring data is reusable. Ineffective test data management can lead to stale data, which can impact testing quality and result in costly late-stage product failures.
Reusing data allows you to save on costs by eliminating the need to make multiple copies of the same data set. It also makes it possible to reduce processing time for creating test data sets. This is especially important for environments with high volume of test tickets and a limited availability of resources.
Reusability can be achieved by using masking or obfuscation techniques to replace privacy sensitive data with synthetically generated data. This approach is much more efficient than copying or cloning because only a fraction of the data needs to be copied. It can be further streamlined by using data subsets, which are smaller-sized test data sets.
Security
Despite the need for effective Test Data Management, it can be challenging to implement. Without efficient TDM, software development and testing can become slow and error-prone, resulting in faulty software deployments and decreased customer trust.
Test environments can be complex, requiring a wide range of technologies and integrations. Inefficient TDM can cause friction between teams and create redundant copies of data. These duplicates waste storage space and complicate the process of locating test data.
To mitigate these challenges, businesses need an integrated TDM solution that provides a variety of tools to meet different testing needs. This includes data generation, masking, scripting, provisioning, and cloning. It also enables a single interface for all data sets and allows users to refresh data granularly and quickly. It can also automatically compare baseline test results with the output of a given test run, helping to identify any problems that may go unnoticed. This is important for meeting compliance and privacy regulations.
Integrity
Inefficient TDM can lead to a host of app performance glitches including crashes, freezes and slow responses. Such problems may impact user experiences and cause a loss of customer trust in the organization.
Refreshing test data regularly prevents stale or obsolete data from impacting software testing. Moreover, it ensures accuracy of the test data and improves testing efficiencies.
Creating realistic test databases requires more than just cloning production data. It includes a series of activities such as masking, synthetic data generation, cloning, rewinding etc. Scripting or automation of these activities makes the entire process more efficient.
An optimal TDM technique should hide data while preserving referential integrity and providing a consistent audit trail. It should also support full-size test data copies that consume less storage space than subsets. Moreover, it should allow users to furnish test data through self-service without requiring centralized teams or dependency on IT ticketing systems. They should be able to bookmark, refresh, reset, archive and exchange test data without involving operational teams.
Automation
Test data management tools should include a suite of tools that automate tasks such as data generation, masking, provisioning, and cloning. These tools should also support a high-speed workflow to enable testing teams to refresh their environments with the latest data quickly.
Inefficient test data management can result in performance issues such as crashes and freezes that can weaken customer trust. Effective test data management, on the other hand, can ensure that tests run smoothly and efficiently, which improves software quality and overall performance.
The primary responsibilities for producing software test data fall on the shoulders of software testers, and in some cases, project or IT operations teams. But a survey by Delphix indicates that more than half of these teams don’t make TDM a centralized and collaborative task. As a result, they are unable to fulfill ticketed requests for new test data in time. This can result in stale data and late-stage errors that can ultimately impact production.
