Test data cost savings

We often hear people say it: time is money. And it’s true, also (or especially) in software development. If you are ahead of your competitors, you can make significantly more money. The same applies to the reverse: if your competitors are ahead of you, you miss out on money – or you get nothing at all.

This is the reason why the pressure on testers is high. They have to approve the quality of the software to be released. To let them do their job as well as possible, you would prefer to give them all a test environment of their own. But creating and maintaining multiple test data environments for multiple teams causes high storage and infrastructure costs. In addition, refreshing all those environments takes a lot of time, of which we have too little.

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Unmanaged test data
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What is your main challenge?

My storage costs are too high

Many organizations use full size copies of production for development, testing and training environments. When the production environments grow, your development and testing environments grow exponentially. This causes high storage and license costs.

For software development you often don’t need a 100% copy. With the use of test data subsets you can easily save terabytes of storage.

Manual refreshes take too much time

When test data requests are done manually this takes up too much time. Not only because of the technical time it takes but also due to organizational procedures.

On average 3.5 people are involved in getting test data into your lower environments. By automating these process you can reduce the number of people involved.

Unmanaged test data

If you want your application to be of the highest quality possible, you need to test until you are sure it’s user-friendly and bug-free. To test the application, you need test data. Customer data for example. Names, phone numbers, email addresses, bank account numbers, or whatever data your application needs. This data has to be equivalent to your production data – otherwise, how can you be sure that the application works well with real-life data? Besides, with the GDPR in place, you also need your test data to be anonymized or masked, because personal data like debts or salary may not be traceable to a person.

Poor test data management costs you time and money. But you can lose something even more valuable: the happiness, innovation, and mental capacity of your employees.

Developers, testers, and business analysts waste a lot of energy discussing and running around trying to get the right test data at the right time. Many of these employees spend more time on finding and preparing test data than on their actual jobs. Inefficient and frustrating, causing a reduction in motivation and satisfaction. We assume we don’t have to emphasize how disastrous this can be for your organization and your product.

Save money, buy time

Do you want to turn things around? Do you want motivated and innovative employees? Do you want to be ahead of your competitors? Then you’d better invest in a proper TDM solution. Make sure every team gets the test data they need, the moment they need it. Make sure they get masked test data to comply with privacy legislation. Make the test work much faster; buy time. A good Test Data Management tool like DATPROF provides you with subsets of on-demand (refreshed) test data that are realistic, masked, and easy to use and distribute. The investment in a TDM solution pays for itself by saving time, and by saving time you’ll automatically save money.