Test Data Definitions

A few terms for software test automation test data management…

Test Data Management Terms

Shared Data – any data source or datum that is used by more that one user. A user in this case may be a system or a human.

Organic Data – Data that is created in the wild, in production by real-life users and systems.

Synthetic Data – Artificially generate data. Sometimes created by automate tests, or other systems that generate data. Many tools exist to generate data. One of the earlier tools is Faker.

Queried Data – Data that exists in a data source and can be pulled with a set of criteria. Generally, we use queries to get this data out of the data source.

Marked Data – Data that is flagged in the data source. The flag may be as simple as a new column on the record called “isTestData” or it may be several fields like test_data_owner, test_data_createdby, test_data_lastused, etc.

Signed Data – Data that has been modified to indicate it is being used by specific processes or people. Signatures are unique to a team, process, or execution so that they may later be identified for troubleshooting or cleanup.