(There was a thread about this some time back? Tools for supplying high quality data for test - #14 by adamattonic ) But I prefer to use a copy of a real customer database (anonomised of course), too. Because fake data infrequently covers all the relationship combinations in systems that have interaction across the entire system. Things like exercising non-default security perms on objects in one component as well as consistency of behaviour in a different component that lives in a different table or even a different database are non-trivial to fake. Upgrade/migration testing also tends to work better on real data. I mean that’s why customers buy your product, because it’s a system, not because it is components.
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