Selecting the Best Test Data Management Strategy for Your Test Automation Process

1. Selecting the Best Test Data Management Strategy for Your Test Automation Process

2. Test data is exceptionally critical for setting a great data management strategy, especially when it comes to making the most of your test automation process. • However, there are quite a number of software professionals who are unfamiliar with the concept of test data management. Even if they are familiar with the concept, it is quite a task for them to put it into practice. • The reason being, the “what” in it is quite easy to decipher, but when it comes to the “how,” there are quite a few methods to manage test data. Let’s look at a few of them. Replicating Data from Production • This is one of the most popular methods, at least if you are a beginner. The very first thing that you encounter while coming up with the data is to feed your testing processes, many believe it is a straightforward process of just copying data from production and get over with it. • It is one of the effortless ways to get data that is as realistic as possible. Nothing can get more real than this. However, nothing is as easy as it sounds while production data replication.

3. On the contrary, the only benefit is the easy access to data. And as far as the loopholes are concerned, there are many, including: • The primary problem is that it needs to be conducted manually. Although you can always rely on scripts and automated jobs to do the work, creating the data is not the only job of an IT test environment management. Availability is a crucial part of the package. • In simple terms, it means that the TDM tool is responsible for ensuring that the data is available, whenever required, at an appropriate time.

4. You can not rely on a naive approach based on scripts to manage the rigorous demands of a sophisticated testing approach, making you force to rely on a manual process to do the task. • The second problem is that the production replication does not lend itself well when it comes to negative test cases. Production replication data also does not work here, in case you do not have any data to replicate. Data Masking

5. As the name suggests, under this approach, the user applies the mask to production data that get rid of personally identifiable information (PII) from the data. • This method is an improvement over the strategy we discussed earlier. However, it is not short of loopholes. The very first being, it does not reduce the time spent while copying data for testing. • On the contrary, it adds more time to the process since it is a newly added process. However, the most significant limitation is that you cannot use it as a standalone approach. The problem is, it can resolve all of the issues that the production replication approach has. Synthetic Data Generation • This method of data test management consists of creating “fake” or synthetic data from the data model. Tools that execute this approach can preserve the format of the data. The biggest benefit of this approach is also its significant downside.

6. We wish that you select the best test data management strategy for your test automation project. So, which of these test data management strategies do you wish to adopt for your test automation process?

7. Contact Us Company Name: Enov8 Contact Person: Ashley Hosking Address: Level 5, 14 Martin Place, Sydney, 2000, New South Wales, Australia Phone : +61 2 8916 6391 E-mail: enov8australia@gmail.com Website: https://www.enov8.com

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