Say “Test data management strategy” in your office, and you might feel a collective sigh. This could be the reaction of frustration of testers that understand its importance to application success yet can’t secure its budget. Likewise, it could be an irritating sign for C-suite and budget decision-makers. They believe that TDM is time-consuming, expensive, and falls solely within the purview and interests of Quality Assurance. The paradoxical combination of fear and fatigue from everyone involved makes their business GDPR compliant by May 25th this year!
The business benefits of test data management are indeed notable and far-reaching. The key to overcoming the first hurdle of gaining the buy-in of budget decision makers is to draw the big picture outside of test and quality assurance and show the value of TDM to the entire organization. It is also important to mention the dangers of using poor-quality data and to anticipate the challenges nay-sayers face while offering reliable solutions and strategies.
From Quality Assurance to Competitive Advantage
The pressure to develop software faster, with better quality and at a lower cost is increasing. To accomplish this, all real competitors have turned to agile testing and development in a DevOps culture. Therefore, it is somewhat shocking that 99% of companies, in their response to the 2017-18 World Quality Report survey, indicated that they face serious challenges when testing in an agile development environment. Interestingly, the lack of high-quality test data is the biggest challenge.
Continuous Delivery and Data
High-quality, relevant, and accurate data is key to the cornerstones of continuous delivery: test coverage, automation, and continuous testing. You can find issues sooner in the development lifecycle with the help of quality data for a less-costly fix and fewer chances of errors in production. If testing and quality assurance fail because of poor data quality, your end product will fail too. The side effect is that dissatisfied clients complain to millions of people on social media and change their loyalty to a different brand, taking family, friends, and followers with them.
In contrast, excellent data hygiene, increased security, and streamlined data management lead to improved customer experience (CX), digital satisfaction, customer retention, better brand reputation, and increased revenue.
Data Regulations
Of course, another obvious benefit of getting familiar with your data, not solely for testing but for the entire organization, is complying with the upcoming GDPR. The advantages here are to reduce the risk of hefty fines– decreasing the possibility of security breaches– and boost revenue by leveraging high-quality data to power effective decision-making and leverage upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
Cognitive Quality Assurance and Data
Cognitive QA is an efficient and intelligent approach to test automation and testing. It includes Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Smart Test Automation, and Analytics with Quality and real-time dashboards. It assists businesses in testing the correct risk areas and enhancing testing coverage. It is one of the top ways to do systematic test automation and is an integral part of the testing lifecycle. With the Cognitive Quality Assurance approach, you can accurately predict the Quality of applications, improvise your regression test suite, do data processing in real-time for service efficiency, optimize test automation, and enhance test coverage.
The correct Test Data Management tools accelerate time to value for business-vital applications and build efficiency and relationships by allowing insight-related decision-making over the whole organization. Not that we have the broader business case. Let’s look at the risks and challenges and how we can face them.
Unstructured Archiving and Data
Even though maintaining records and data isn’t the most exciting aspect of running a business in the finance sector, it’s essential to a company’s long-term success. Most employees and the C-suite aren’t particularly interested in archiving and safe storage until an audit, a regulatory audit or investigation, or a lawsuit is filed. Strong data archiving rules and tools can help in certain circumstances and help you save a lot of time, money, and effort. This entails a platform for safely storing and indexing unstructured data to ensure that all critical or potentially useful material is correctly stored.
Technical Challenges
It is a significant challenge that causes concern among organizations and is one of their toughest challenges compared to other data-related issues. After thorough research and resource allocation, data is acquired, and a precious asset containing private information could pose several risks to the responders and the firm. Avoiding data breaches would be made more accessible by employing cutting-edge technology to properly secure your data and be aware of how and by whom this data may be accessed. The management of encryption requires the involvement of data security experts, and its goal is to stop unauthorized access and look for any unintended deleting, moving, or other potential obstacles.
Conclusion
Test data management assists businesses in creating better quality software that works accurately on deployment. It prevents errors and rollbacks, and overall, it makes a more budget-friendly software deployment process. It also reduces the business’ security and compliance risks.
