IT businesses invested in software development face complex challenges during the entire development phase starting from the first phase till the product delivery. With technology upgrades, the software development cycles are getting more complex.
With limited resources and increased demands for applications, IT firms require hundreds of test environments to meet application testing expectations with different methodologies.
With the increasing number of environments, IT environment management is now becoming tricky. With the enhanced speed and efficiency, the importance of implementing test data management tools is now undeniable.
Once you’ve developed test environments and datasets, managing them is equally important. Studies suggest that only 4% of the firms utilize test data management tools.
This post will discuss what test data management is and why you should integrate test data management.
What is Test Data Management (TDM)?
Test data management is the data management process necessary for accomplishing the needs of automated tests, with as little or zero human intervention.
- TDM solution creates the necessary test data according to the demands of the tests.
- It must also ensure that the data has the highest possible quality. Insufficient quality test data will generate results that can’t be trusted and are therefore useless.
- Test data should resemble the real data found in the production servers as closely as possible.
- Finally, the test data management process needs to guarantee the availability of the test data. It’s useless to have high-quality, realistic test data but doesn’t get to the test cases when it needs to.
What Are The Advantages Of Test Data Management?
High Quality and High Availability Quality Data in Automated Testing
If you feed poor data to any industrial process, the results will be disappointing. Irrespective of how great the test strategy is, you’ll receive bad results every time with flawed data.
Another vital responsibility of TDM is ensuring the availability of the test data. Your data might be of the best quality imaginable. However, if it’s not there when required, it’s useless.
Another definitely worse thing is having low-quality but readily available data.
High-quality data with high availability is the only desired result, and there should never be compromised.
Therefore, not caring about your test data quality and availability will waste your financial investment.
Better Test Data Coverage
TDM helps in maintaining the test data traceability to test cases and then to requirements. This offers a bird-eye view of the overall test data coverage and detects patterns.
Reduces Cost By Discovering The Bugs Early
As discussed previously, there is improved test data coverage. The traceability helps to visualize a clearer picture. This helps to find the bugs early and reduces the cost of production fixes.
Facilitates Data Provisioning Based on Testing Type
TDM processes have a unique feature- the data is managed in one place. From the same repository, necessary data can be provisioned for different testing types-Integration, Functional, Performance, etc.
With this feature, redundant data copies are reduced, and hence the cost of storage is reduced.
Enhanced Data Compliance And Security
TDM process involves data masking- data compliance and security are given top priority.
Offers Reusability Of Data
One of the most worthy features of the TDM is data reusability and helps in further cost reduction.
TDM involves sorting and archiving data in a central repository for future use. Whenever the requirement arises for reusable data, the testers can utilize the archived data.
Testing automation tools help to manage elaborate test data with continuous testing.
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