Test Data Management: Challenges, Solution, and Valuable Benefits

The testing industry is going through a new revolution like every other technical area and is trying to find ways for the optimization of testing efforts and costs. Testing involves the validation and verification of any software, product, or application program to check if the required guidelines are met or not.

For a successful testing process, it is important to watch out for test cases which are brimming with high-quality data, as testing assurance goes off the tangent without the high-quality data. But question arises here that where can one get the quality data? Production data is considered to be the best when it comes to testing. It is always advisable to prepare and chalk out the sub-set of data as it minimizes the effort that comes under the test planning and its execution. With the potential for expensive lawsuits and breaches of privacy, one should avoid live data for testing. Moreover, the live data is incomplete and raw and cannot be used for testing. So the real challenge is to get the quality data for testing.

Appropriate and proper test data is necessary if we want to bring down the financial losses caused by production defects. Powerful financial and banking institutions invariably bank upon the high-quality test data sets as they are more prone to the financial losses caused by production defects. These test data sets help also in data masking of sensitive information and synthetic data creation that is very significant in the operations of a financial institution and their test data management.

Test Data Management

Test data is of two types: static data and transactional data. Static data comprises of names, currencies, countries, etc., which are not sensitive in nature. But when it comes to transactional data there is always a risk of the data getting stolen, as it involves data like credit/debit card numbers, information pertaining to bank accounts or it can be your medical history. Hence transactional data is very sensitive in nature. Test Data management is the method by which we can satisfy the test data requirements of test teams by including high-quality data with right quantity and format. It helps in ensuring that data that is being picked up for testing subsumes everything from quality to the appropriate sizing and its provisioning can be done by synthetic data creation or production extraction. Clearly defined processes and manual methods are very significant in implementing the test data management. If you are looking for ideal test management tool, check out these 6 features.

Challenges of Test Data Sourcing

Solutions and Valuable Benefits

1. Provides the enhanced quality of test conditions.

Solutions

It is imperative in today’s world that exact patterns of production are developed, a requirement many organizations found very difficult when carrying out high quality data testing. This challenge is sorted and tackled with test data management tools. These tools can be used to grab and copy similar patterns in the test environment which is very good in taking the test data quality to the next level.

Benefits

Test Data Management tools helps in enhancing business confidence for instance in test coverage and in higher quality applications.

2. Processing Cost and Optimized Storage

Solutions

The space and the volume of any test environment increases with the online purchasing of additional projects, resulting in increasing the storage costs. As the size of data increases, the processing expenses also increase, which further adds to the costs and expenses of processing the larger volumes of data. An effective test data management framework makes the data readily available to the test team and helps in reducing the size of test environment.

Benefits

Test Data Management helps in designing a road map of tasks and strategies which does not compromise the availability of data.

3. Shorter time for Batch Processing

Solutions

It generally costs more to process larger volumes of data, which is sometimes not necessary and results in time wastage. Effective Test Data Management helps in reducing the batch process window.

Benefits

Test Data Management brings improved compliance of data protection policy and regulatory framework. Data masking solutions of TDM prove to be handy in the ever-changing world of regulations.

Conclusion

TDM is a great boon in testing the performance of projects and helps in delivering swift benefits as the larger amount of data can be prepared quickly and effectively.  The bottom line is that Test Data Management helps in reducing the costs, time and efforts which is required in detecting the defects in tests and production processes.