Some Aspects of Test Data Management Strategy

Test Data Management (TDM) is the process of planning, requisitioning, mining, masking, and/or encrypting, provisioning, storing, and managing the test data needed for validating the functional and performance aspects of a software application for quality and usability. TDM aligns closely with the software development life cycle (SDLC) and separates production data from test data by protecting privacy and at the same time keeping the data useful for making meaningful validation. Protection of privacy of data using masking and encryption techniques has advantages and disadvantages. If not carefully analyzed, masked or encrypted data has been known to create inconsistencies and gaps in records that can cause incompleteness leading to wrong conclusions. Excessive and stringent protection algorithms can also cause a performance bottleneck. This paper examines the people, process, and technology aspects of how test data can be managed without exposing customer information as pros and cons effects of the techniques used for data protection. While adoption of any model for algorithmic masking and encryption is not discouraged, these models need to be experimentally validated using parallel testing before adopting on a large scale to determine that ‘protecting data’ did not ‘distort the outcome’. Challenges associated with data provisioning, sub setting, and data refreshes are also examined from a strategy standpoint along with architectural implications asking a question – is this data protection theme overhyped, that it makes data management such a complicated and costly problem? Finally, we look at synthetic data, that seems to solve problems arising out of encryption issues due to overdoing and data masking issues that poses centralization of the masking tasks done a by special group causing extra dependencies leading to delays. Both encryption and data masking are complex tasks, requiring specialized tools that are expensive, and still do not eliminate the threat from insiders.