Spreading a little love – some Valentines Day themed goodies for you
Valentine’s Day activities for geeks
Great story on ComputerWorld today – http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/careers-hr/my-career/news-analysis/index.cfm?articleId=2066&email – includes ideas such as technology-related films to watch with your loved one onValentines, twitter love hunt events and more…
Seven reasons to love a developer on Valentine’s Day
Adrian Bridgewater’s blog on ZD Net had me chuckling this morning – I often see that deep concentration akin to the ear-crumb incident he describes…
http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10012138o-2000458459b,00.htm
and finally….
The St. Valentine’s Day Data Massacre
by George Wilson, Operations Director of Original Software
On the 60th anniversary of the legendary US gangster slaying in Lincoln Park, Chicago, it is perhaps appropriate to use the title of the massacre as an analogy to describe one of the most dangerous but widespread issues currently taking place in QA and testing departments around the globe.
Testing on live data.
Industry estimates suggest that approximately 70% of IT departments admit to using live data during their application testing process. One can understand why. It makes the testing more pragmatic, gives a clearer indication of true quality and allows the application in question to be tested more thoroughly. The problem is that this can expose sensitive data to less than sensitive employees or contractors.
The acquisition of data for testing may breach the Information Security safeguards of your live system which could result in fraud, malicious damage or even legal action if confidentiality is lost.
The simple fact is this: Carrying out testing on live data without the consent of the individual whose data is being processed is illegal.
“But it can’t be. And anyway, we have security procedures in place”. Regrettably that is the attitude of many hard pressed CIOs today. Organizations demand on time delivery of tested software, and live data tends to reveal more ‘real world’ errors or so CIOs have always believed.
But that doesn’t make it legal.
Starting with the stringent Data Protection regulations in the European Community, and spreading worldwide, the law says, very clearly, that the individual whose data record is being used must know the purpose of the processing.
Common sense and good practice say that exposing traceable production data to test disciplines is risky. Despite legal requirements and in some cases severe penalties for breaking them, testing on live data still tends to be common practice. One survey showed 62 percent of companies were using live customer data to test applications and 49 percent shared this data with outsourced testers, with no way of knowing if it was ever compromised*
So, what can be done? Is there a way for QA staff to carry on testing with live data without leaving themselves and their organization at risk? In short, can this ‘data massacre’ be eliminated?
Of course it can. With a clear Test Data Management (TDM) strategy in place you can ensure that you will dodge those data protection bullets, as well as being happy in the knowledge that your entire testing process is underpinned by good quality, legal test data.
Test Data Management is fundamental to the success of your test strategy; after all, data drives the entire testing procedure. With bad data comes poor testing, results you cannot trust, and a whole lot of wasted time, money and effort, and maybe even the odd legal dispute. It pays to get data management right.
Effective test data creation will address issues of disk space, data verification, data confidentiality and protracted test durations. Control of test data ensures that every test starts with a consistent data state, essential in maintaining your data in a predictable state at the end of the test. Checking both visible test results and the database effects is a key principle of Total Testing, a task which is practically impossible to do manually.
This philosophy enables a true regression testing capability to be built and automated, without the need for complex algorithms and checks to make allowances for changing data.
Intelligent data extraction functionality dramatically simplifies the process of creating and extracting data subsets from your live database – with great efficiency and full referential integrity with no program complications. With total control to amend data during extraction, and the ability to extract data from remote sources, data maintenance becomes simple and efficient. Data integrity, for any purpose, is assured.
For more information on Test Data Management, and how Original Software can help you avoid any test data massacres, log on to www.origsoft.com
* The Insecurity of Test Data: The Unseen Crisis, – a Compuware / Ponemon Institute study