Software bugs in production cost money, and lots of it. Did you know that a software bug in a live environment costs up to 1000x more to fix than if it’s found in testing? So let’s think about how the bugs get in to our live systems and consider reasons why were they could have been missed in testing.
Test teams are given production data to test with:
Production offers volumes of data, so it’s the perfect place to get data for testing – right? Wrong. Production data doesn’t cover ‘outlier’ data conditions, causing poor coverage and inevitable software bugs in production.
For example, imagine a supermarket. The cash register scans thousands of items such as bread, milk and cheese every day without trouble. However, what happens when someone buys a bottle of “sake” that is a one off stock order and they use a combination of vouchers, cash and card to pay for it? This outlier data condition was not tested, because it was not the everyday. What if this specific condition had a bug that managed to bring the whole system down? There would be lots of unhappy customers abandoning the long queues, their shopping and going elsewhere.
Test teams are having to manually create test data:
Creating test data manually is a seriously time consuming task and it is tedious too. It is also a task that rarely results in the level of quality and coverage that is required to fully test a system, before it goes live. Using manual data to test with is not the ideal scenario and will lead to bugs being missed and found in production.
Now for a solution: Get your scenarios covered with dummy data!
Instead think about generating ‘mock’ or ‘dummy’ data to use in your test and development environments. These rich sets of compliant data can be tailored to your requirements, providing you with the smallest amount of data you need to satisfy all of your test cases. This will ensure that your tests are covered and that testing delivers a high quality, bug free, product.
Dummy data can be based on an accurate picture of your data model, making it production like. However it will contain no sensitive content, will be based on your testing requirements and will ensure that you have the 100% functional coverage in smaller, richer sets of dummy data.
We are giving away a free trial of CA Test Data Manager, the data generation engine. This will allow you to create rows of rich, intelligent synthetic test data to use in development and testing. Try it for free today.