We all make New Year’s resolutions usually when we’re nursing hangovers, full up on turkey and mince pies and feeling a couple of stone heavier! But New Year resolutions don’t have to stop at making improvements to ourselves, we can bring new ideas and processes to our jobs too. Let’s have a look at 5 ways we can kick-start getting our data into shape!
- Go synthetic:
Are you using copies of live production data in your test and development? Why not get your data in shape and generate data synthetically. This way you will have smaller sets of richer test data that has improved coverage, the ability to test future scenarios, is compliant and can be shared between teams. This will ensure that your organisation is up to date with current data regulations and be one step ahead of the game with an improved testing process.
- Remove bottlenecks in testing by sharing:
Waiting for test data can cause bottlenecks in development and testing, slowing the process down considerably. Remove these holdups by having a central test data warehouse to store data, enabling data to be shared between teams and therefore avoiding testers having to wait for test data.
- Clean up your old test cases:
Often, when auditing test cases, we see that a large amount of them don’t need to be there. They might be duplicates, redundant due to a change in features or just unnecessary. Sifting through your test cases to find which ones you actually need may seem daunting, but the benefits of not running test cases that aren’t required can be a massive reduction in time and money and can help your projects stay on time and on budget.
- Improve coverage:
Improve your test coverage this year and ensure that you only release high quality products to market. Think about using a tool to automatically create the smallest number of test cases that covers the maximum number of paths. This will mean that bugs are found earlier, before they make it into production where they cost a great deal more to fix. Finding bugs earlier will improve the quality of the application and let you deliver faster.
- Tighten up your security:
Using live data in test and development is a big no no. This year, clean up your act and at the very least employ a data masking tool to mask your live data before it reaches the test and development teams, this way you will avoid fines and customer defections due to a high profile data breach – not something you want for your organisation in 2015.
Or you could make test data from scratch and choose to ‘go synthetic’ and use a data generation tool. This way you will not only know that you are entering 2015 with data that is 100% compliant, you will also be ahead of game when it comes to quality of testing and software delivered earlier and in budget.
