How do you handle your test data?

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21

yikes! that is a worry to find production data in unexpected places. It makes me think that we need to reduce the risk and create our test data ourselves. It’s quite a risk in our product (HR software), but i suppose we could explore it somehow.

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haha love that " making real evil data"

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You have a really good point here about the test data not being able to bring out the bugs… thanks for sharing that thought.

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thanks everyone for replying to my post. Some very thought provoking thoughts I’ll digest.

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Let us know what approach you took :stuck_out_tongue: !

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Interesting thoughts here. I tend to use a subset of data that works for the happy path and edge cases we have defined. I’m not expecting my automated tests to discover new bugs, just verify that it works in the cases we know of.

For the corner cases we don’t have in our tests, we rely more upon our observability/monitoring/etc to catch issues, and if we find things here that we want to handle, we add it to our test environment (whether that’s in images, a separate DB, whatever)

I think for teams that rely heavily upon exploratory testing to catch issues, the data fidelity to the variance you might see in production becomes more important, and that’s when I’d be pushing for prod data replicated to test environments.

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Will do! I’ll get back to you all.

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Most of the time, when it comes to handling test data, testers and QA services often deal with the challenges related to inconsistency, validation, privacy, and of course data selection.

A few tricks that might work for you handling test data that I personally prefer can be:

  • Start with a careful plan for selection, migration, validation, and evaluation.

  • Make sure you always mark sensitive information so that it is not exported leading any compromises.

  • Maintain a well-defined data source to keep all the necessary information.

I work as VP Delivery and Operations with Software Testing Company, here is the useful link related to how to Generate & Manage Test Data that may help you

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“It’s always a configuration problem”