Five Critical Elements for Successful Agile Data Management

In the past few years we’ve used cloud technologies to improve pre-production flexibility and solve many problems that previously prevented us from delivering high quality apps to production. However, one problem consistently prevents full test coverage prior to deployment—the lack of comprehensive test data. As we try to get faster and leaner in our agile development processes, the problem with data becomes even more difficult to solve. Robert Kelman describes the evolution of DIRECTV’s (now AT&T) Agile Test Data Management program. He explains the five critical elements—centralized team, automation tools and processes, aggressive environment refresh, test data organization, and innovation through experimentation—of their data management program, which supports both development and testing efforts. Robert examines the details and examples of these five components, and demonstrates the relationships between them.