What is Test Data Management?

In the technology world, there are a lot of buzzwords that you might be hearing about but might not understand. Today, we’re going to take a look at test data management (TDM).

TDM is the process of creating production-like environments for testing purposes. This includes masking sensitive data so that it can be used by teams without risk.

What is TDM?

Test data management is a set of processes that ensure high-quality test data for use in testing applications and systems. It also ensures that test data is accurate and reflects real-world behavior, which improves application quality and reduces software errors during deployment. It’s critical to have test data that accurately represents production data in order for automated tests to produce reliable results.

Managing large volumes of test data requires a significant amount of time and resources for the organization to prepare, maintain, and distribute. This can lead to delays in the software development process, which can have a negative impact on application quality and cost. Test data management can help alleviate these issues by reducing the amount of time spent on preparing test data, providing better access to realistic test data, and improving the overall quality of test data.

 

In addition to increasing the quality of test data, TDM also enables organizations to create more effective and efficient testing environments. For example, TDM can help organizations create non-production environments with a smaller storage footprint by optimizing the amount of space required to store the data libraries. This reduces costs while still providing a fast retrieval speed for the test data.

TDM Requirements

Testing applications with real-world data increases realism and helps teams better understand user behavior. But locating the right test data for each test environment can be challenging. It requires identifying the different types of data and the locations where it is stored. Also, ensuring that the data can be easily version-controlled to track precise changes made during testing.

The best TDM processes ensure that the data is timely, valid and realistic. This is especially important because it can impact major functionalities and overall app performance. Poor TDM can lead to errors during production that result in crashes and slowdowns. This could damage customer trust and lead to a decline in customer retention.

TDM also helps organizations lower costs and increase the speed of software deployments and updates. It also improves the quality and accuracy of the data used in software testing. In addition, it can reduce security risks by limiting access to sensitive data and preventing the unauthorized use of information.

TDM Implementation

The key to successful TDM is implementing well-defined processes that allow testing teams to achieve high quality test data in an efficient manner. This creates a more cost-efficient software deployment process, lowers compliance and security risks, reduces false defects in production, and helps the organization to improve its bottom line.

TDM requires a variety of tools to meet the steep demands of modern software projects. The tools must be able to provision a spectrum of test data to address functional and performance testing needs. This can be achieved through synthetic data creation, production extraction and masking, or sourcing from lookup tables. A modern TDM solution must be able to reduce the number of duplicate copies across environments, allow for the sharing of common data blocks to minimize storage costs, and provide workflow automation to eliminate manual processes.

In addition to these benefits, a TDM approach also ensures that the most up-to-date data is available for testing. This reduces time spent on data preparation and makes it easier to fulfill ticketed requests for test data. It also increases the number of test cases that can be run, which results in more comprehensive coverage and improved testing effectiveness. It also helps the team avoid costly errors in production that would otherwise have been discovered by testing and resolved through a bug fix cycle.

TDM Tools

The best test data management tools provide a variety of capabilities that help teams address the challenges of managing large amounts of data and provisioning the right data for each testing type. These tools offer the ability to automate data subsetting and masking, extract and load data at the business object level, preserving database and application relationships, as well as create synthetic or augmented test data. They also have the ability to store, share and reuse data sets across different projects.

As enterprises shift to DevOps, the demand for high-quality test data has increased significantly. This new approach to software development accelerates the time it takes for IT teams to deliver high-quality applications to market. However, it can lead to a tangled web of data sources and challenges with meeting compliance and privacy regulations.

The best test data management tools enable teams to meet these requirements by providing a single system where all the relevant and required test data is stored and accessed, making it easy for testing teams to locate and retrieve it. They can also support multiple test environments, enabling teams to easily roll back the results of previous tests.