What is the importance of Test data management? Does testing with realistic test data gives you and edge?

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.

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.