Sudden and regular changes of test data requirements are always an expect during software development projects. This is usually due to the dynamic nature of business environment and it makes the processes more complex for the IT organization. It can be very time and cost consuming for IT company to assess change of the business environment and determine new sets of test data requirements. Although it is almost impossible to avoid pressure from such situations on IT companies, the company can release the pressure for some extent by following efficient test data creation methods such as automation. Automation is widely used in software development companies for multiple tasks in order to save the time and costs. Often their solution is, using automation tools for every possible software testing tasks such as test data profiling, test data & test case creation, test data masking etc.
If the software development company gathers test data from the business database, it is possible that those data may be including sensitive information of the business, as well as business customers. Test data masking does not only keep the client's and their customers' information safer but also avoid IT organization is being penalized by law. Protecting confidential data of businesses is a legal requirement. Since test data masking takes considerable amount of time of overall software testing phase experienced IT organizations utilize automation tools to identify PII risks (Personally Identifiable Information) and mask if such data exist in their databases.
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