TDM, commonly known as test data management, constitutes a series of processes or workflows that create/extract, manage and deliver quality test data to relevant application teams. TDM is a new approach that eliminates the traditional unstructured and siloed movement of data.

In the current technological advancement and digital revolution era, every organisation needs to create and deliver high-quality software products at an increasingly competitive pace.

While various organisations have adopted agile release management process and DevOps to fulfil these ever-evolving demands, many firms considerably underinvest in TDM. Lack of streamlined TDM processes has now become a constraint to innovation.

Now TDM approaches largely focus on increasing application uptime, facilitating faster time-to-market, and reducing testing costs. Just like any other IT discipline such as DevSecOps, cloud and release management, TDM is rapidly maturing.

Once considered as a back-office operation, TDM has now emerged as a vital business enabler for bringing organisation agility, security, and cost-efficiency.

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With increasing volumes of application projects, efficient TDM processes have become a necessity rather than a luxury, solving various test data concerns. This brings us to the question, which test data challenges currently plaguing the IT industry?

Let’s find out!

4 Test Data Challenges Faced By IT Organisations

Test Environment Provisioning Is A Time-Consuming And Highly Manual Process

Many IT enterprises focus on the request-fulfil model for provisioning tests data to developers and quality analysts. The developers and quality analysts require to put in a request and wait in the queue of requests for their turn to arrive.

Since extracting and creating test data requires substantial time, your development and testing teams might wait for several days or even weeks to get their hands on the relevant test data.

Such manual and time-consuming provisioning can indefinitely disrupt the software release calendar.

Development Team Don’t Have High-Quality Relevant Data.

Development teams often don’t get access to relevant test data fit for particular testing.

Often, your developers are compelled to work with old data due to the intricacy of refreshing an IT environment.

This can lead to increased data-related issues, more bugs, and ultimately loss of productivity.

Data Masking Can Prolong Your Release Cycle

Data encryption and masking are crucial when dealing with sensitive information such as healthcare details, credit card numbers, addresses, etc. Failing to comply with the data compliance standards can attract hefty financial penalties and huge reputation damages.

Therefore rather than a choice, data making is a legal obligation. However, data masking can introduce friction in data processing and might prolong test cycles.

Storage Is Becoming Increasingly Expensive

As an organisation working on multiple projects, creating several redundant test data copies isn’t something unusual. This huge pile of redundant data can lead to inefficient storage utilisation.

Operations teams need to continuously coordinate test data availability across various teams, software, and release versions to address consistent demands within limited storage.

Consequently, your development teams often need to compete for limited, shared environments, leading to costly delays in the release management process.

With efficient and effective TDM, all these challenges can be addressed, and an easy solution can be adopted throughout your organisation.

Also Read: A Data Loss Prevention Security Checklist & Best Practices for IT Professionals

Benefits Of Test Data Management

Access To Superior Quality Data

• A professional TDM team achieves optimal coverage by using intelligent data tools and techniques leveraging data analysis strategies.
• Insightful data analysis and data requirements review ensure early detection of bugs and timely resolution.

Reduced Time For Developing Quality Data

• Professional test data management services offer dedicated data provisioning teams for your requirements. Additionally, these teams function under pre-defined service0level agreements (SLAs), thus assuring almost instant data delivery to the required teams.
• Implementing automation leads to minimal rework and reduced result replication time.

Minimal Data Storage Expenses

Overall infrastructure cot drastically reduces due to decreased data redundancy and thus less requirement of data storage.

Minimal Resouce Requirement

Professionals with a specialised skill set in data management exclusively focus on test data processes and generally have access to high-tech tools for contributing to the success of your TDM process.

High-quality and accurate test data is the backbone for releasing efficient applications rapidly. Developing the best practices and hiring a professional partner for Test data management are the keys to growing and sustaining the ever-evolving application development realm.