The Power of a Test Data Lake in Agile Environments
According to huge survey over more than 200 QA professional across the globe, it’s clear that more than three times testing took place on Test Data Management. Finding test data becomes almost impossible for QA engineers when multiple systems are included in the process of business that needs to be tested.
For many professional QA engineers, all they are to find out the golden record which can be used for testing a business process and this can only be done by email with all the details of the account which require data for test data architect. Then the process will go vice-versa. The person who received the email will now report all the issues through SQL queries to verify the correct set of test data that can be used for testing by QA engineer. If the testing request is repeated with existing data then the process will take near about 15-20 minutes for the number of days and if the delivered data isn’t suitable for the profile then the result of test data will be missed or failed due to the unavailability of accurate test data. Here, test data lake comes in use. Test data lake permits test data architect to occupy the test data to use it as an environment for a data lake. After hiding the crucial information, this process can be easily done which is based on production environment and generating data on tables which are not created on a production system. Test data lake system which is the most important part of Hadoop environment supports the less used storage option of Hadoop. In test data management, professional QA engineers get access to the test data forms the self-service interface which is top of the test data lake. From there, they can check the test data to verify the complete test coverage and also build up the test data where it is lacking. QA engineers can even highlight some specific rows of data in a table within the test cases to pick out the references easily in future and also for keeping the log reserved. Reservation of these rows helps professional QA engineers to test data without interfering other QA engineer testing data. If the testing engineer is able to test the data in the test data lake in an Agile environment, then he/she can easily make copies of the tested data to keep a record. QA engineers get advantage to manage their own test data with this approach of test data in test data lake in an agile environment. Also, it makes test data provisioning as the essential part of DevOps for repeatable testing possible in the Agile environment under Test Data Management.