A few days back one of my colleagues, who happens to work in the QA division of a big financial organization, narrated an incident which his manager was extremely bothered with.
“You take all necessary measures to do a proper functional system testing. You do everything to identify and retest all the defects. At the end of the system testing process, you deliver a successful Test Completion Report. But then, during the UAT phase, there are always a few defects left. Any idea why? You complete all the testing then why is it that there are always some defects that are found in UAT testing and not in system testing? ”
If you have been involved with software testing at any point of your life, this would sound like a familiar story. You tend to think you have all the test scenarios covered and then one fine day, code defects hit you very late in the testing phase. Or worse, when the code is running in production, if a defect hits the customer, you realize that this should have been ideally tested and reported during the QA process.
Not having a sound test data management strategy can have catastrophic effects for businesses. We have listed 3 key reasons why you should give utmost importance and priority to having a sound test data management strategy in your organization:
Gaining Customer Trust
This is probably the biggest reason why you should be investing in a sound test data management strategy. For users of your consumer application, imagine the kind of negative impact when your application crashes due to improper test data coverage. Or when you relied on your test data management solution to give you synthetic test data (that ideally should have matched very closely with your real data), but that too failed when the customers entered a corner test case for which you didn’t test your application code against. Incidents of such nature break customer trust. Period. Chances of them returning to your application are bleak as they would be wary if your application fails again. Customer trust is hard to get. Don’t let it slip away by not having a solution that leaves glaring holes in your test data management strategy.
Lowering costs associated with finding bugs late in SDLC
A lot of studies have proven the fact that finding and fixing bugs in later stages of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) can cost upto 30x times more than if found and fixed during the early phases of the delivery process. The high costs with emergency fixes is often due to the time it takes to duplicate production data in the test environment before remediation can even start. Imagine the kind of savings you can achieve by having a test data management strategy that can help avoid all the unnecessary costs with finding bugs late in the development life cycle!
Avoiding too many copies of test data
A lot of times, application owners create plenty of copies for the purpose of test and development of their code. A lot of these copies tend to be of the exact same size as the original code. So, a lot of physical copies of production data tends to float around in an organization, with app owners not sure which of them is really useful and which of them are junk. This creates a problem of managing test data effectively. With a sound test data management strategy, not only can app owners avoid high storage costs associated with tons of physical copies of production data, they can also avoid having to manage tons of copies of data.
Download this whitepaper to know more on how you can adopt a sound Test Data management strategy that helps you overcome the challenges listed above!