In my previous posts, I explained about the building blocks of the concepts of Test Data Management (TDM) namely Data Subset, Data Masking, Data Archive, Test Data Refresh, Gold Copy. Alternatively you might also want to read all articles from the table of contents. In this post, I will try to explain why TDM is critical to a project's success.
- Your test data determines the quality of testing
- No matter how good your testing processes are, if the test data used is not right or of adequate quality, then the entire product's quality will be affected.
- Your test data should be highly secure
- It is absolutely mandatory that your test data doesn't contain data from production without being masked. If the data is not secure enough, then there is every chance that a data breach might happen, which can cause the organization dearly.
- Test data needs to be as close to real time as possible
- Not only that test data needs to be of quality, it should be as close to real time data / production data as possible. Why? Simple reason is we do not want to build a system/application/product for 6 months and fail in the production just because there was not adequate real time data to test.
