Thursday, March 23, 2017

Tips to design your test data

Tips to design your test data

Tester should always focus in test data that he is going use for validating an application. Aim of this article is to provide importance of test data in testing as well as to provide the standard guidelines to prepare test data that can be used for testing.
Test Data Introduction:  
Test data is nothing that the inputs that are planned by the tester to test the software/application. These planned data or inputs are added as column in the test case to showcase that these type of input should be given. This documentation of adding the inputs will be done during the test case preparation. Based on the input expected result of the application functionality will get differs that are all added as different scenarios during the test case preparation.
Importance of test data:
If the test data’s used in the application is good then the quality of the product will gets reached its maximum level. We can test both the field and data level validations using test data.
Test data are used to check and ensure that the desired functionality is achieved or not.
Type of test data which we used will help the developers to ensure the fix for the problems.
Different scenarios and flows can be planned based on the input data in testing.


Test data types and its usage:

Creating the test data is an art that will be helpful and different based on type of testing we are performing. Bulk amount of  test data is needed for Scalability, Integration, Volume testing, Load and  Performance testing.
Test data can be prepared and defined in below types
  1. Valid input data -  This data is indented to test whether the application is working in happy or positive flows
  2. Invalid input data - This invalid inputs are useful to verify the application is working when tried with negative inputs and flows
  3. Boundary test input data – When range kind of input comes into testing please use boundary testing
  4. Empty without any data - When input is expected trying without any data
  5. Special characters and wrong input data format  - Entering the values that are all not relevant to the system or application functionality

Tips for creating efficient test data:

  1. Always test data should be updated based on requirement changes in that specific area of application in frequent intervals. Otherwise your expected result will be wrong and application may be correct.
  2. Test data should be designed during the test case preparation. It will be reviewed by the team during the test case review that will be helpful for team add inputs or suggestions to improve the quality of data.
  3. If there necessity of creating large amount of data for kind of evaluating the product in the perception of scalability try to generate the large amount of data to be loaded in the test environment using Data Generation tools. Manual creation of test data will be higher than the testing time.
  4. Test data should always cover the happy flow as well as all possible negative flows of an application.
  5. Make sure to keep the test data along with the test case if it is manual testing. If we are using data files as input to an application make sure that file is not corrupted.
  6. Ensure that we have used black box and white box testing techniques to create test data. This approach will make tester to avoid exhaustive testing.
  7. Utilize developers thoughts while framing the test data that will enrich the quality of test data.
  8. Identify dependable fields in an application to create inputs that affect other fields.
  9. Test data should be related and meaningful to that specific functionality of the application.



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