Importance of Test Data Management In QA Testing

There is constant pressure to release high-quality software in a short period. This has prompted the software testing industry to optimize the costs and efforts required for testing. One of the important areas for optimization is test data management.

What Is Test Data Management In Software Testing?

Any data used as an input to perform a test is called test data. The data can be static data such as currencies, countries, names, etc. or transaction-related data. The testing team needs the right combination of static and transaction data sets to test for business features and scenarios.

Test data management is the process of ensuring that test teams have the right amount of quality test data in the right format with the appropriate environment at the right time for testing.

The test coverage mainly depends on the quality of the test data. The test data must resemble the actual production data to test for effectiveness.

Challenges In Test Data Management

1. Explicit data requirements with quantity specifications are neither gathered nor documented during the testing requirements phase.
2. The test team does not have access to the sources of data.
3. The test team may require test data from the development team that is usually busy with another priority task.
4. Large amounts of data may be available from production dumps that may be unsuitable for business scenarios that have to be tested.
5. There are no suitable tools to manage a large amount of test data.
6. There is no process for reviewing or reusing data.
7. The same data can be used by multiple testing teams in the same environment resulting in corruption of data.
8. A lot of time is wasted by the testing team in communicating with solution architects, database administrators, and business analysts rather than actual testing.
9. If data related to a certain defect is missing during testing, it can pose a major risk at the time of production.

What Are Test Data Management Tools?

Test data management tools manage test data that will be used by the test team. These TDM tools help in implementing the process of test data management. The main features of test data management tools are:

Self-service data warehouse
TDM typically provides testers with a data warehouse to store, share, and reuse test data to improve test efficiency.

Providing data subsets
They also provide small datasets based on the requirements of the test plan.

Reporting
These tools ensure compliance with data governance norms by monitoring data and providing reports.

Advantages of Implementing an Effective TDM Approach

1. The test data requirements are effectively captured by the testing team to keep version-controlled data requirements. It also helps in traceability and replication of data.
2. Detailed analysis of data requirements helps identify any potential issues that may arise during testing.
3. Synthetic data can easily be created for testing new features.
4. Data security and security policies can be implemented effectively.

Conclusion

Successful implementation of test data management approaches will significantly improve test effectiveness. It also ensures that large amounts of data can be created efficiently and for a rapid test process.