Why the right test management is an important component and success factor – not only to stop the Corona Pandemic but also in software development
by Iris Boers
Vivit EMEA Local User Group Liaison
The year 2020 has so far been dominated by the novel corona virus Sars-CoV-2, which has spread worldwide in recent months since it first appeared in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan at the turn of the year. In Europe in particular, the number of infected people is rising rapidly, and many nations have already responded with rigorous measures. Almost all European countries have sealed off their external borders with neighbouring countries to slow down the spread of the virus. Public life has come to an almost complete standstill almost everywhere and social distancing and self-isolation have become a matter of course everywhere.
No matter where you look, the strategy of individual countries, no matter where in the world, in fighting the pandemic is the same everywhere. Bringing public life down to a lunar scale, isolating those identified and above all testing, testing, testing.
But especially when it comes to testing, or rather test management, there are considerable differences between the individual countries, which leads to data confusion and a lack of data evidence, and which ultimately makes it difficult to better estimate the true extent of the pandemic. To understand the scale of the COVID-19 outbreak, and respond appropriately, it is absolutely vital to know how many people are infected by COVID-19. With the current test procedures, where mostly only people with symptoms, sometimes even only people in hospitals with severe courses are tested, there is, for example, a high degree of uncertainty regarding the number of unreported cases of those actually infected, which makes it difficult to better understand the virus and to better adopt the measures taken.
The importance of quality test data and effective test data management
The test data management is not only in the case of the fight against Corona- epidemic of pivotal importance, we as IT professionals know already for a long time that high-quality and realistic test data is the lifeblood of any automated test process within the software development. Put simply: GOOD TEST DATA = GOOD TESTING AND DEVELOPMENT
Having access to stable test data is the biggest challenge to effective test automation for most organizations. And now, with the fast feedback required by DevOps, the consequences of a lack of good test data are even worse. That's not going to cut it when most organizations now see quality as a key driver for business outcomes, according to The World Quality Report. Too many organizations are faltering with test automation—and therefore DevOps—because they can't, or don't, manage test data appropriately.
To be successful in DevOps you need a reliable set of automated tests that confirm that a given build is ready to move to the next stage in your pipeline. To be reliable, your tests must have access to a consistent, predictable set of data. But having good data is only one matter, but what about the environments? Where can tests access this data, and how?
The ideal solution occurs in tandem: spinning up environments and data simultaneously ensures that they both align, avoiding the bugs and delays created by data/environment misconfiguration. Adding modelling, synthetic test data generation and virtual data creation to this approach furthermore augment the quality of both test data and environments, enabling complete test execution against vastly complex systems.
Making the simultaneous and augmented data/environment provisioning available on-demand further removes bottlenecks and a dependency on a central team. It provides parallel access to the data and environments needed to test fast-changing systems rigorously and continuously.
If you would like to learn more about how to optimize and accelerate test automation and about the quality of Test Data and effective Test Data Management, here are some tips from the Vivit Community:
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