Automation Test Data Management (TDM)

Test Data Management (TDM) is fundamental to the success of automated testing. For example, consider that one of the most beneficial forms of test automation is data-driven testing, which gives testers the ability to input and manipulate massive amounts of data in a relatively short period of time. If the data is bad, then running the tests could produce a mountain of unreliable results, and a whole lot of wasted time, money and effort. It pays to get data management right, especially with test automation.
Associated with test data creation are issues of capacity (i.e., disk space), data verification, data confidentiality, and prolonged test durations. If other forms of testing, such as manual or performance, are taking place in the same environment, there can be issues of concurrency, with tests failing simply because key data has changed “behind the scenes” during test execution, with records locked or altered unexpectedly.
Checking both visible test results and the effects of test execution on the database are essential to successful automation. Every automated test must start with a known data state, and end with the data in a predictable state — or even in its pre-test state.
Some questions that will help in planning a test data strategy include:

• How will data be created and entered into the system?
• Will production data be copied? If so, how will privacy of information be ensured?
• Will data need to be created from scratch?
• Who will be responsible for test data?
• What volume of data is needed to test the application or system, and how frequently will it need to be refreshed?
• Should date be refreshed completely, or incrementally?

In some cases, the test automation tools can be leveraged to load all the pre-test data and thus create the initial state of the database prior to executing functional tests.