Test data management (TDM) is one of the most time-consuming and resource-intensive problems in continuous delivery today. Every test project needs data. However, less than 31% of companies today have a dedicated test data strategy. Additionally, over 77% use a manual approach to TDM (Tricentis customer research, 2021). This slows down testing, and agile delivery. What’s more, production data is stored and integrated across multiple, rigorously evolving legacy and modern enterprise applications. This makes the extraction, usage, and masking of production data for testing a major challenge. With thousands of test cases and test data getting consumed and altered throughout the end-toend process, agile teams struggle with keeping data stateful and complying with data privacy regulations. How can we ensure that test data is consistently managed when testing across business architectures? What are the most effective TDM strategies that agile teams can employ in order to drive quality at speed?
In order to answer these urgent questions, we spoke with several of our customers– test managers and software testers– to examine what TDM approaches they employ across teams. In this paper, we recap some of the common obstacles and propose effective strategies for managing test data in complex environments.