How An Effective TDM Strategy Can Provide Valuable Business Benefits

Test data management (TDM) is a time and resource-intensive process for numerous big corporations. To illustrate, at one American insurance company, test data collection accounted for 16% of all testing activities, translating into $3 million spent on TDM for a project costing $20 million. By introducing sophisticated TDM processes, the company managed to cut testing expenses by $450,000.

Why Test Data Management Matters

Accurate, pertinent, and high-quality data is essential for Continuous Delivery’s foundational elements: testing breadth, automation, and consistent testing. This caliber of data helps uncover flaws sooner, making fixes more cost-effective and reducing the likelihood of production bugs.

Poor data quality that impacts testing and QA can negatively impact the end product, possibly leading to customer dissatisfaction and their migration to competitors, amplified by social media influences.

Superior data management practices, including proper data hygiene and security, boost the customer experience and fortify customer loyalty, enhancing the brand’s standing and financial gains.

Industry Drivers of Test Data Management

Businesses aiming to craft high-quality software at minimal costs must amass, handle, and consolidate vast consumer information to flesh out advanced TDM strategies, supporting nimble deployment methods now seen as critical. The pivot towards Agile methodologies and DevOps principles underscore a pressing issue: the scarcity of quality test data is becoming a significant impediment.

While fostering speed and adaptability are crucial objectives, they must be balanced with strict adherence to security regulations and compliance standards. Hastening software delivery cannot come at the cost of compromising customer information, which would jeopardize client confidence and could subject enterprises to data breaches, legal repercussions, and monetary sanctions.

Within many entities, a notable disparity exists between the necessity for comprehensive test data and its availability to software teams. Overcoming this gap requires providing Agile units direct access to self-service test data and extending API functionality to facilitate seamless integration within Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) workflows.

To obtain adequate testing coverage, teams must enrich their production data use with synthetic alternatives. However, synthesized datasets typically fulfill only about 20% of the wide-ranging needs.

Due to the frequent absence of necessary test data, it is instrumental in empowering software groups to retrieve reliable test data autonomously. Moreover, furnishing API interactions is paramount to integrating test data utilization seamlessly into CI/CD processes.

How An Effective TDM Strategy Can Provide Valuable Business Benefits

Through the use of efficient TDM strategies, businesses can tackle the aforementioned issues. These approaches enable teams to achieve the subsequent advantages:

Speed Testing and Time-to-Market

TDM is designed to deliver high-quality data promptly. It allows testers immediate access to large volumes of test data so they can concentrate on testing rather than data generation. With sufficient test data, TDM supports efficient test design and execution cycles, ensuring thorough and precise testing while hastening the product’s release.

Ensure Data Security and Compliance with Data Masking

Given the vast amounts of personal data they handle, companies must ensure TDM complies with rigorous cybersecurity and privacy laws like the GDPR in the EU and HIPAA. This is crucial for businesses in regulated sectors like finance and healthcare, where failing to comply can result in substantial legal or financial penalties and harm their reputation. Efficient TDM solutions enable swift information masking, reporting, and compliance checks, safeguarding sensitive data, and upholding security and regulatory standards.

Avoids Duplicate Test Data Copies

Replicating production data can lead to storage constraints. TDM helps reduce this by providing solutions for generating smaller datasets. It lets teams extract only the necessary test data, reducing redundancy, saving on storage, and lowering expenses. Moreover, a reservation system for test data lets testers locate, reserve, and optionally release the needed data for their testing.

Achieve Greater Quality

By incorporating specific TDM procedures into the testing cycle and utilizing sophisticated TDM tools, teams can reduce errors and protect data integrity. Additionally, they can make future test processes more efficient by setting clear rules for data storage, archiving, and access.

Non-Functional Benefits

Here are a few non-functional benefits of implementing effective TDM strategies.

• Scalability – Maximum data capacity size and processing speed
• Reliability – Data accuracy, precision, and timeliness
• Maintainability – Dynamically validate clusters that have been added or removed
• Utility – Employ various offsets to reuse data
• Security and Compliance – Leverage encryption and masking to protect sensitive data
• Serviceability and Manageability – Data consistency and profiling

Conclusion

To maximize the speed and efficacy of TDM, teams need to generate optimal data, safeguard the security of sensitive data, and maximize process automation. Before deploying a new test data strategy, teams must ensure it addresses the organization’s security policies, regulations, and compliance mandates.

With optimized TDM strategies and capabilities, enterprises can transform the entire QA model and associated functions. In the long term, organizations can realize such key benefits as delivery excellence and reduced operational and capital costs.

Need help? Contact our TDM experts to learn how an effective TDM strategy can provide valuable business benefits.