Managing vs Creating Test Data

Karthik Muthupalaniappan, Monday, July 7, 2008 @ 5:27 pm

This is my first blog post at Pathfinder. I m excited to be a part of the Pathfinder team and look forward to working on a number of different diverse projects. I had a tough time trying to decide what the subject for my first post was going to be.  I finally zeroed in on "Test Data Management vs Creation".

In one of my earlier jobs at a reputed insurance company's IT organization, We came across this problem that posed a big challenge. We were building a real-time policy servicing application. The problem was finding the right test data to test the application. The QA folks were spending so many man-hours trying to find the right test data or set-up test data. "Test Data Management" was becoming a big pain and was hurting the project badly in terms of time and costs. The solution?

"Test Data creation" was proposed a viable solution to this problem. The idea was to build reusable tools that would use the application to generate test data to suit the QA organisation's needs. These tools determined what the tester's test policy needs were, used the application services to generate test policies and provided them to the tester.  It was a great idea! The application that was to be tested was SOA driven which made it easier for this solution to work. I was a part of the team that worked on developing these tools. Some of the tangible benefits that everyone saw with this approach were:

• Life of QA became much much easier.
• Imagine the amount of time and money the company was going to save.
• The application was being tested repeatedly when it was used for creating the test data.
• Test Automation became easier.

The QA organization's mantra became "Forget about managing and reusing test data, create new test data the way you want it!"

Related posts:

1. Creating and Distributing your own gem: a quick rundown
2. Nice List of Data Visualization Tools
3. Data Driven Design and the Culture at Google
4. Lesser Known Test Processes
5. Help, My Test Is Failing!

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