Learn about a revolutionary way to provision test data that’s impacting how enterprises structure their dev/QA teams and totally changing how testers work.
Traditional Test Data Provisioning
Do-It-Yourself Test Data Provisioning
Streamlining the Process with Test Data Products
Traditional Test Data Provisioning
High-quality, compliant test data is crucial for effective software testing. However, obtaining this data is often a time-consuming and error-prone process. Traditionally, data engineering teams have been responsible for preparing and provisioning test datasets for software teams. The test data preparation tools they use perform data extraction, scrubbing, formatting, masking to protect sensitive information, and data delivery to the targeted lower environments. For data engineering teams, the requests for test data are endless and SLAs are tough to meet.
The primary reason that test data generation has remained within the domain of data engineers is the technical expertise that’s required. Preparing test data without a deep understanding of the source systems, their data structures and hierarchies, is a tremendous task.
Even commercially available test data management solutions often demand in-depth knowledge of data sources, SQL, and scripting for transformations like aging and maintaining referential integrity.
Naturally, software developers and quality engineers are slowed down or idle while waiting for test data, and software delivery timelines are hindered.
However, now there’s a way for software testers to instantly access the test data they need, and achieve greater agility in software delivery…
Get the latest Gartner report on test data management.
Do-It-Yourself Test Data Provisioning
Agile software teams can overcome test data obstacles by using tools and methods that empower test data stakeholders to provision test data independently.
Modern test data management tools should be user-friendly and require no data engineering or SQL expertise. Testers should be able to express their test data requirements in plain business language, enabling instant access to the necessary test data. For example, they could request, "Get me production data for all Texas residents – who spent over $5,000 this year and are Gold members of our loyalty program – into the QA environment."
Instead of waiting days and weeks for test data provisioning teams to answer such a query, test data subsets matching these criteria could be provisioned in minutes using self-service tools.
Streamlining the Process with Test Data Products
A test data product approach solves the test data provisioning problem.
A test data product encompasses everything needed to provision a dataset from a higher to a lower environment, including data ingestion and delivery, transformation and masking logic, and APIs for CI/CD integration.
A test data product allows users to perform various operations such as subsetting, reserving, aging, refreshing, snapshotting, and rolling back – without having to understand anything about the underlying source systems’ complexities.
Test data products are configured by data engineers and used by software and quality engineers across the organization. The benefits of this approach include:
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Faster software delivery, by eliminating test data-related delays
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Better software quality, through shift-left testing and the detection of early code defects
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Enhanced productivity, as data professionals focus on more impactful work
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A better employee experience, by empowering developers and testers to be self-sufficient and automating tedious tasks
When test data management is based on test data products, software testers can provision test data themselves, resulting in faster delivery times, improved data quality, and enhanced productivity.
Learn more about test data management tools based on test data products.
