Switching to agile technologies practices create more room for testing team in many software/system/applications development companies. That causes to have the strong and reliable test data and proper management of test data and environment. Test data management ensures quality of testing and in turns the quality of end product. With the help of automated test data, the time of testers can be saved and used in any other operational areas; the test data can be gathered from production data and used for data-driven testing. Some products may need to gather and execute huge amount of data; on such cases, the automated data management is essential where human testers may not work continuously which may take more time even. It is essential to have the best test data management to have the quality testing. Let's discuss on the best practices to manage test data.
Identify and gather test data : Have depth knowledge on the operations of end-users of the product and the transactions which usually carry out by the end-users/businesses is very important on preparing test cases and identifying test cases. Same data can be used by different type of end-users on different levels; for an example in a sales agent company, they have inventory management, customer management, invoicing and so on; the customer details are used by customer management system and invoicing system, the product details that they sell is used by inventory management and invoicing. On such case, the test data should be identified to fit both type on end-users. Data can be in any format and be spread on overall business processes, it is the duty of test data manager to identify all possible test data to ensure the quality of end-product.
Organize test data from various data sources : Once the test data is identified and pointed, it is necessary to organize the data and set up a data model. Organizing and optimizing the gathered test data help to have a quick test runs as well as such data should be more than enough to find out all possible bugs of the product. It is essential to setup test data forcefully to cause the errors to test how the product responding such cases.
Privatize or masking sensitive data : Once the data is organized, it is highly recommended to secure the sensitive data; such as details of clients, employees, actual transaction details, payment details and etc.
Compare test results : Clearly understanding the areas, that deviates from actual/normal/expected results is key of testing and the testing department (team) should always ensure that in-order to release a less-bug-free end-product. To do so, an automated system can be used to compare the test results and test data. The automation is recommended as that saves more time and effort.