Get a Handle on Your Test Data—Starting Now

If you don’t proactively manage and control your application test data, you may be missing out on a big process improvement that will save money, improve test coverage, and may save your systems from embarrassing failures. Paul Merrill describes the advantages and disadvantages of four data strategies—Elementary, Refresh Data Source, Selfish Data Generation, and Selfish Data Generation with Batch Cleanup—to help gain control of test data. Explore the two components of a data strategy—the Creational Strategy and the Cleanup Strategy—and their value to effective testing. Learn the key constraints—policy, cost, test expectations, infrastructure, and people—to consider when implementing a data strategy. See how these factors manifest themselves situationally in well-known constraints like Shared Environments, SUT Downtime, Technical Skills, and Test Repeatability. With a deeper understanding of data strategies, their components, identifying constraints and their constraining factors, you can take back new ideas for selecting the best strategies for getting a handle on your test data.