Test Data Management and Mage
Date:
By: Daniel Howard
Classification: InContext
Testing is an essential part of software development. Likewise, effective test data management is important for enabling comprehensive and expedient testing. In an ideal world, your test data sets would be just big enough to provide an appropriate level of coverage but still small enough to avoid running any unnecessary tests.
At the same time, much of the production data you might like to use for testing will invariably contain sensitive information, which is protected under a multitude of regulations (GDPR et al.). You will either need to locate and protect this sensitive data before you use it for your testing, or create entirely new data out of whole cloth.
Satisfying these conditions is the domain of test data management, which is the primary topic of this paper. We also highlight Mage, a particularly effective solution for test data management.