Test data management is a vital process for effective testing. It
is essential to create a solid test data so as to avoid run time defects in a
live application or a product. It is required to update the test data time to
time as an old test data can lead to some major issues in the application.
Realistic test data helps in ensuring complete testing coverage. Performance
tests requires huge amount of data set. At times creating data manually will
not detect some minute bugs that may only be caught by actual data created by
the testers testing the application. A proper and appropriate test data will
always lead to cost effective testing.
Testing plays an important role in these days by ensuring that applications
for different industries met required standards. For better control
organizations make sure that testing goes on speedy and control project related
costs, in order to achieve the same TDM (test data management) should be
effectively put in place. Testing with realistic test data gives you an
advantage always, a good TDM covers
a) Cloning of different production environments to test environment can be done. The data required on test (stage) environment required in less amount than production environment.
b) A good TDM ensures and helps to creates well organized test databases.
a) Cloning of different production environments to test environment can be done. The data required on test (stage) environment required in less amount than production environment.
b) A good TDM ensures and helps to creates well organized test databases.
With the proper test data a tester can analyze that application
provides the result desired by the customer, he/she just needs to feed the test
data in the application, follow them and analyze the expected data
generated is correct or not. This helps
in identifying the basic purpose of creating that product is fulfilled.
Therefore there is an important significance of the test data. Therefore the
testing with realistic test data gives us the edge as it becomes easy for the
user to enter the real data in a simulation and obtained the desired results
from the product as it is duly masked. It leads to time saving, low costing and
no need for the user to have the detailed study about the project as Test data
and the fields are in front of the user and he just needs to follow the
instructions.
By managing the test data one can think of having new data updated
according to new requirements or changes made in the product. Managing is
important as it can help in reusing old data used in previous releases. Also
keeping in mind that if one set of test data targets specific group of users
there can be a case when that data may cause exceptions in other module which
hampers the users. So keeping data as sets also helps in finding exceptions in
the module. As this helps in gaining confidence in the end-users as they feel
happy to use the product. Strategizing the needs and getting the data is
crucial from the inception of the product.
An accurate application software testing requires the
identification of adequate data that the application must access, process and
display. This data ensures the proper functioning of not only the core
application code but also related functions, such as database calls, back-end
Web Service call, the business rules that govern the sharing and processing of
information and the user interface. Realistic data often proves as the ‘truth’
for testing. With the help of realistic data, we can minimize the risk of data
errors and improving test quality.
