5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Data Management

1. 5 Ways to Ensure Successful Test Data Management In this technology-dominant age, it has become imperative for organisations to adopt quality assurance practices to employ and deploy high-performing, glitch-free software applications. Even many companies have already adopted a shift-left approach and continuous testing strategies to improve application quality and lower the possibility of failure after software release. Software testing involves several assumptions, dependencies, constraints, and critical success factors, making it a tricky process. Companies must establish a test environment similar to real-life conditions to achieve the highest possible accuracy. It’s when Test data management (TEM) comes into the picture. TEM is about developing a stable and usable environment comprising necessary software, hardware, networking components, and databases to execute application test scenarios and identify bugs. Read further to explore how your organisation can overcome the TEM implementation challenges and ensure a successful test environment management strategy.

2. How can businesses improve test data management? Knowledge Management and Demand Awareness Before you start with the planning process, you should understand the requirements. With clear expectations, you can achieve the best possible results. Make sure to devise the test environment management strategy, keeping your target consumer needs in mind. In addition, testers writing down the test cases should develop a knowledge base based on the demands and incorporate it within the test case. Suppose the resource base or test environment creator is changed. In that case, having a knowledge repository will help the successors to quickly comprehend what, why, and how to continue with the test environment setup process. Planning and Coordination You can’t ignore the importance of efficient planning for the success of test data management when it comes to software testing. Since there are no separate test assets for developing and testing teams, the test managers should plan, coordinate, and communicate the schedules for both teams beforehand to avoid conflicts and disagreements caused by shared usage. Moreover, you can leverage event calendaring to streamline application testing activities and avoid unnecessary delays. It is not cost-effective for organisations to set up two different test environments. The only ideal course of action for any company is to share the test assets. Software development and testing teams can avoid the chaos of sharing test assets with proper planning, coordination, and communication. Standardise and Automate Defining the standards for the test environment is another practice you should adopt for a successful test environment management strategy. Always specify the test environment standards based on your consumer’s needs. This standard will provide a benchmark for analysing the validity of application tests. After setting these standards, automate iterative tasks and build, deploy, and shakedown processes to save valuable time and manual resources. With a lean testing approach in the application development process, automation will enable the fulfilment of the CI/CD pipeline.

3. In addition, you can use automated TEM tools to decrease the number of test environments needed in a test bed. It will further lower the costs incurred to improve the test environment provisioning time. Mask the Test Data According to IDC, approximately 37% of organisations state that serious threats originate from internal sources, while 70% of breaches are sourced from endpoint devices. The rising cyber attacks pose the greatest threat to companies in the current IoT-driven scenarios. Enterprises can protect their software test data against cyberattacks by masking it and refraining from using factual user information in the testing phase. Data masking is all about creating structurally similar but fake versions of organisational data used for software testing. The format or original test data remains unchanged, but data values are altered. You can leverage service virtualisation, data fabrication, and ETL automation to ensure the production source data complies with the PII standards. Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) can guarantee successful Test data management by aiding unsupervised provisioning, configuration, and decommissioning of the operations environment. Using IaC, companies can automate continuous monitoring and infrastructural maintenance concerning configuration changes, writing scripts for infrastructure adjustments, version control, and network connectivity. Moreover, Infrastructure-as-Code is an application test environment that can boost collaboration and effective change management. With automated mundane supervision processes and configurational adjustments, IaC eliminates the need for written documentation, saving a lot of time for testers. Summing up it all Test environment management (TEM) is crucial to develop a stable and usable environment to test applications and identify errors or bugs beforehand effectively. It acts as a vertebral support to run software testing cycles smoothly.

4. However, the changing scenarios and evolving test environments have made it imperative for companies to develop an effective test environment management strategy. With a well-devised TEM strategy, you can easily set up transparent test environments, leading to successful software testing and deployment. Remember that a successful test environment management strategy involves deploying transparent end-to-end testing processes. Efficient planning, resource management, process optimisation, and test automation are critical factors for achieving the same. Employing the above-discussed ways can help you succeed in your TEM strategy. Contact Us Company Name: Enov8 Address: Level 2, 389 George St, Sydney 2000 NSW Australia Phone(s) : +61 2 8916 6391 Email id: enquiries@enov8.com Website: https://www.enov8.com