Grid-Tools Test Data Management
Date:
By: Philip Howard
Classification: InDetail
Test Data Management (TDM) is about the provisioning of data for non-production environments, especially for test purposes but also for development, training, quality assurance, the creation of demonstration or other dummy data, and so on. There are essentially three ways to derive such data: you can take a copy of your production database and, where appropriate, mask any sensitive data; or you can subset your data and mask it; or you can generate synthetic data, based on an understanding of the underlying data model, which means that no masking is required. Each of these approaches to TDM has both advantages and disadvantages.