Test Data Management (TDM) has become a very important part of software testing process. TDM is evolving and undergoing constant refinement with rapid changes in technology landscape and software development process. A lot of organizations work with fast changing business goals to reach out to end customers. This requires that the test data is available when required for a comprehensive software testing. There are a few trends that will define how the Test Data Management strategy will shape in the next coming few years.
Big Data
Big data is a rapidly evolving technology-driven program and its strategic influence in organizations is growing by every passing day. We are living in a world where data breaches have been rising more than ever before. With the adoption of big data increasing at a faster pace than ever before, test data architects need to have a solution which helps them achieve data privacy and security. As data proliferates in enterprises, so does the test data as well. Hence it is imperative for IT organizations to expand their data privacy and security compliance initiatives by including lower environments and test and dev environments into the scope.
Data Virtualization
DevOps is a very critical component of a software development process. For getting DevOps right, organizations need to have a testing environment that is reliable, accurate and very comprehensive. While this may seem a daunting task, testers need to execute tests on the application with different code versions and test data combinations. And so test data architects need to have solutions in place that can virtualize application data and test it with predefined test data combination. A lot of organizations all over the world are using application data virtualization techniques to minimize a lot of costs with using physical copies of production data in non-production environments.
Agile Methodology
Agile methodology is all about delivering projects within short delivery cycles and with high quality. In every agile sprint, the test teams build, run and automate test cases for which the DevOps teams need data refresh and provide the test data to perform the tests. In an agile world, it is imperative that the data refresh and provisioning of test data is instantaneous as that would mean that the testing team would spend less time on provisioning test data and more quality time on actual testing of data. Having a solution that would help testers achieve fast provisioning of test data would be ideal for completing the tests on time and saving organizations a lot of valuable time and money.
Learn more on how you can adopt a sound Test Data Management strategy that helps you stay on top of the trends mentioned above!