What does TDM mean? TDM is the acronym for Test Data management (test data management) and consists of Creation of data sets that, without being of production, reliably mimic real company data. for system and application developers to perform rigorous and valid system testing.
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Test data quality is essential. If the applications are tested with generic data that does not seem real, numerous issues could arise when those applications are put into production. That is why what TDM also means is avoiding problems without putting real data at risk, rigorously testing applications with data that is as similar as possible to the actual data to be used.
Why shouldn't production data be copied for testing??
Production data is not practical for use in a test system due to potential legal and security issues.. Data containing personally identifiable information must be modified to protect individuals. Confidential data should not be exposed on development and test computers.
What TDM means is that data masking techniques must be put in place to obfuscate personally identifiable information.. preserving the format and other properties of the data that are important for testing.
What does TDM mean and what is its impact on the cloud?
Test environments have been moved, in several cases, to the cloud. The cloud environment does not relieve test data management of some of its challenges. Among the challenges faced by those who know what TDM is are::
- Privacy: It is necessary to know and apply the existing privacy regulations and when extracting test data from production systems this implies that masking techniques may be indispensable.
- Coordination: Complex systems often integrate with other systems, setting up a shared test environment. In this stage, coordination of data sets is essential to avoid collisions. What if one of the applications under test is used by mistake and the data is overwritten? Only those who have experience in this field and know what TDM means can imagine the scope of the consequences..
- Integrity: Ensuring relational integrity between systems is another of the great testing challenges.
- Restart– When testing the data, understanding all changes made is essential. This vision must reach all integrated systems and it is the only effective means to be able to resort to restoring the dataset to a clean starting point, if required.
But, at the same time from all these challenges, the cloud as a test environment puts developers to the test with two more difficulties. Those who want to know what TDM means should consider the limitations associated with:
- Network bandwidth: this is an aspect to pay attention, fundamentally when the tests require the loading large volumes of data since bandwidth is regularly calculated for daily operational traffic and may be limited for initial and test data uploads.
- Limitations of SaaS environments: In this circumstance, provider restrictions may cause no direct access to the database layer, which would be restricted to the extraction and import of user data, content and configuration information.
