Avoid Data Quality Issues during Testing (TDM)

Why do we see data quality challenge in lower environments (Test, Dev, QA) that we do not see in Production Environments?

If the project team was asked to set up lower environments for any new solution, it might be that the TDM (test-data-management) methodology is not a formal corporate process.

TDM may be simply described as capturing non-PII (sensitive) production data and coping a full or limited set of the data to the non-production environments. This non-PII data may be 1:1 or masked during this process.

A TDM (test-data-management) process for a new environment may be a challenge if there is no current production environment or that the current production environment is from a prior solution or M&A (merge/acquisitions).

While there are formal paid tools/solutions for TDM, a project team may wish to leverage CLI (command-line) and/or scripts to create this sub-set of non-PII production data for the lower environments.

This process may be as simple as deciding to export the full DIT (directory structure/directory information tree) of an LDAP store with all its current group names, but replace the userID/Full Name/sensitive data with “dummy/masked” data. This exported data would be loaded with the near-Production data, to allow for full use-case and negative use-case testing in the lower environments.

The Goal? Avoid show-stopper or high-level issues due to missed data quality concerns during a Go-Live or Business Release Cycle. This is very important when we have a small maintenance window to add new functionality.

Let us help with the knowledge transfer and building of representatives environments. We see this challenge often for the IAM solutions that manage 1000’s of endpoints, where even the basic Active Directory representation is missing the same DIT structure and group objects as the project AD domains, especially for M&A business projects.