For a leader in the IT industry, a thorough understanding of the software development life cycle is imperative. This understanding must be tempered with the knowledge of software testing and its various implications. A rigorous, high-stakes testing process depends on quality, timely, and contextualized data for its efficacy. Test data management (TDM) ensures that the testers get ready access to high-quality data. They can emulate real-world scenarios to optimize the product and fix issues before deploying it into production. You must have a test data management process in your enterprise to ensure high-quality product churn out while optimizing cost and compliance.
What is Test Data Management?
Test data management is a process of providing high-quality data for testing. This process is responsible for creating the required data and maintaining its quality and availability in the necessary format and volume. The TDM process consists of several steps to ensure timely delivery of reliable, high quality, and actionable data – both accurate and mock – to the testers:
- Data Generation: TDM solutions generate or collate mock data based on the requirements of the test. This data helps testers get as close to the end-user environment as possible to test the product’s efficacy.
- Data Obfuscation: TDM tools secure sensitive information such as passwords, tokens, personally identifiable information, and financial details. The solutions use data masking and data anonymization to achieve this.
- Data Subsetting: Also known as data slicing, this technique is used in production cloning to acquire only specific pieces of data. Subsetting makes cloning cheaper by reducing the infrastructure and storage requirements.
- Provisioning: Allocating necessary data to the test environments when required is called provisioning. TDM solutions ensure testing is not crippled by a lack of data in the required format.
- Integration: For the CI/CD process to work correctly, it is imperative that test data distribution is automated and integrated into the TDM tools.
- Versioning: It enables flawless repeatability of tests and granular control over revisions of test data repositories.
Why is Test Data Management Necessary?
Quality data ensures that the product is of high quality and conformant. By arranging and making available required data in a timely fashion, test data management ensures that the testers can make a threadbare analysis of the software before it goes for production. Besides, tests conducted on high-quality data ensure minimal downtime, bugs to affect the smooth flow of the processes, or any added cost to fix the flaws. By overseeing a thorough product QA, TDM ensures that the end-user is satisfied with the product. This means that quality data can offset the possibility of rollbacks, thereby saving the companies huge costs. Besides improving the ROI, TDM enhances the reliability of the testing process, which in turn enhances compliance and reduces security risks.
Reasons for Selecting a Test Data Management Solution
Organizations have plenty of reasons to choose test data management, primarily because it ensures:
1. Improved Test Data Coverage
Test data management facilitates the ability to trace test data back to test cases and requirements. This way, the test coverage trends and defect trends can be seen from a bird’s-eye view.
2. Reduced Costs due to Early Detection of Problems
There has been a substantial increase in the coverage and traceability of test data. As a result, faults are more readily detected, and corrective actions are less costly.
3. Data is Furnished Based on Testing Type
A distinctive aspect of a TDM process is that data is controlled in a single location. Data for several types of testing, such as functional, integration, and performance, can be given from the same repository. This decreases the number of duplicate data copies and the cost of storage.
4. Keeping Data Secure and Compliant
Everyone must follow the government’s regulations and compliance norms. Data masking is an essential aspect of the TDM process, and data security and compliance are of the utmost importance.
5. Data Reusability
The most helpful characteristic of the TDM is data reusability, which helps to reduce costs. Reusable data is identified and saved in a central repository for future use. The archived data can be used by the testers whenever the need arises.
Although many businesses acknowledge the benefits of test data management tools, they fail to implement them properly. But they are not solely to be blamed for this. As test data management terminology and buzzwords evolve, more sophisticated approaches are being employed, leading to the inundation of knowledge.
Avo’s iTDM integrates with Avo Assure. It is a package of test data management technologies that include data masking, subsetting, discovery, and test automation solutions. The application also consists of a slew of other capabilities that benefit development teams. It is intended to supply development teams with the data they require securely. The tool assists teams in discovering and creating data subsets for testing. Smaller data sets can be provisioned to minimize overburdening infrastructure and enhance test speed. It also assists test teams in achieving scale compliance by masking data to remove any sensitive information. Contact us to streamline your test data management process.
