Test data Provisioning

What to do when your test data is too time consuming?

Most test data requests take too much time because refreshes are processed manually. There are too many people involved in the test data provisioning process. Long waiting times have a negative impact on your time to market.

Using a self-service portal and/or an automation tool you’re able to refresh on demand. It can even be integrated directly into your CI/CD pipeline. Automating your test data processes helps you save a lot of time.

Searching for test data can take up to 50% of your testing time. You need specific test data to cover your system under test properly, but you’re wasting valuable time searching for it.

Finding test data quickly that is aligned with your test cases will have a massive impact on the quality of your software release and the time to deliver it.

Production databases are growing more than ever before. When using full size copies of production your test and development environments increase as well. Therefore it may take days or even weeks of extra time to restore these environments.

Using reduced sets (subsets) of test data reduces the time to create, refresh or restore these environments so you test and develop more in the same amount of time.

Go to provisioning tools

Data Provisioning Resources

Data subsetting

The concept of data subsetting is surprisingly simple: take a consistent part of a database and transfer it to another database. That’s all. Of course, the actual data subsetting isn’t that simple.

How to subset test data

Subsetting is copying a part of the data from one database (source) in to another (target). Therefore, you need a source to provide the data (typically a production database). The target is typically a dev or test environment.

Continuous test data

The impact of having a full copy of anonymized production data on Continuous Testing is no different whether tests are automated or performed manually. It’s a discussion about representativeness and speed.