Hi Dave, I’ve never dealt directly with a UAT team before, is this subcontracted?
I suspect there is one big thing going worrying me here structure-wise, but then still a real need for a good tool… but that’s in itself another smoking gun. I’ve been planning to create such a tool myself @davecoleman , but not sure how it should look or work, you may notice a recent thread on this very same topic. Generic in-house test data generator with a GUI. What might this look like? - #12 by devtotest
Problem #1 is that “the business” are asking “the builders” for a template machine that creates data that is following business logic and is thus data-consistent, to rules which “the business” itself created. The builders of the software are probably not supposed to be separate from the business, but it can happen. So ideally, they should be configuring the tool whatever the tool is. This is a warning that you might have a “team” that is being lazy, by just asking for data. If not actually thinking about what we do, the minute we stop thinking, we are not longer testing anything at all, and the entire exercise stops being quality centric, since it’s not testing anymore: (James Bach words, not mine Why Scripted Testing is Not for Novices - Satisfice, Inc. . )
- I don’t disagree, you need a tool for this, but the tool needs to be configured by someone in “the business”, not by someone in “the builders” team.
Problem #2 Two teams, will want different things. Any such tool needs to be able to inject “bad user” data, or data that tries to break the business logic or the actual “input guards”. I seriously doubt that the first group of users of the tool want that at all, but your team clearly will want such a capability (I know I do.) I would also be wanting to regularly change and update the tool, for evil and also for good purposes (like differing app versions). This would be at variance with what the business want, and IMHO they are better of rolling their own generator app in the longer term as a way of creating a better responsibility as well as change management separation.
- Starting to think a lightweight “locally hosted” portable web app might do what we are wanting here, and have found a source of data which might be used - will need to check commercial license on doing that. My concern is that the definition of what fields to output and what “options” are valid becomes a DSL(domain-specific language) itself if we let it.