Quality Engineering Role in Root Cause Analysis

The worst defects are the ones that become incidents in production. You might hear about the cost of defects in various stages of the SDLC, but I’ve seen incidents that cost over $1M an hour in production downtime. Some QE teams might avoid looking at these because the fire is too hot. If you are… Continue reading Quality Engineering Role in Root Cause Analysis

Use Test Data Automation to Hypercharge Test Execution

How do you get the data you use for testing? Do you find it? Create it? Request it? What if you only had to find it/create it/request it once? How easy would your life be? MUCH EASIER is the answer. So, finding it or having to create it isn’t easy. What if you switched over… Continue reading Use Test Data Automation to Hypercharge Test Execution

Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse

As part of a workshop discussion someone posed the following example to our group of test professionals and asked how we would solve the following problems. I am paraphrasing. How do we insure data quality and integrity at the application programming interface (API) level in the new data warehouse? Note that the solution below is… Continue reading Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse

Cover the Data Coverage Gap with Data Scripting in GT Datamaker

Talking about testing, most of the time we are used to working with sets of data that will be used over and over again. Then a refresh comes to the environment, and again we will have the same data, maybe some changes or addition will come but it will be the same. Most of the… Continue reading Cover the Data Coverage Gap with Data Scripting in GT Datamaker

Test Data Management Maturity Assessment

Test data generation has matured beyond the realm of inputs, as it is described on Wikipedia. Test Data practices must consider the overall quality of the digital assets for a business. The data are not only persistent, they are often the most important IT artifacts for these businesses. With the emphasis on software development in… Continue reading Test Data Management Maturity Assessment

Test Data Management: It’s More than Masking and Subsetting…

Recently, I Googled test data management (TDM). I’m not sure why I was surprised by the results, but I was. The majority of the results on the first page were focused on subsetting and masking from production. This is not the whole picture. Why is subsetting and masking not the only answer? Production copies will… Continue reading Test Data Management: It’s More than Masking and Subsetting…

Database Virtualization with Delphix

There are all sorts of issues trying to get the right data to the correct people, in a timely manner. For different tests during the different phases, there is a new solution that could help you with that. Delphix is a tool which virtualizes databases and files, keeps track of the changes, and lets you… Continue reading Database Virtualization with Delphix

Great Test Data Requests with Jira

Since 2011, I have been in too many projects and my main activities were to create, deliver and provide data from Grid-Tools Datamaker to the Testing team. All the communication flow was only by email to request different types of data such as new customers, new brands, materials and so on. The most common problem I had was… Continue reading Great Test Data Requests with Jira

Data Quality as an Initiative

If your business is capturing or coordinating persistent data as a primary function then it behooves you to create a data quality initiative that improves your Test Data Management (TDM). There are common opportunities in the way that IT organizations manage, coordinate and execute their processes around test data. The actual data are not securely… Continue reading Data Quality as an Initiative

More on Test Coverage

As promised here is my continuing post on Test Coverage. More on Test Coverage… Last post, I wrote about how developers can evaluate their code coverage and overall code quality using their development tools. This post covers how the test team becomes involved more directly. Specifically we will focus on. Test coverage workflow Test case… Continue reading More on Test Coverage