iqnite 2013 Sydney, Australia
It was great to meet so many of you at iqnite 2013 in Sydney!
It was also very interesting to hear Ben Issa of ING Direct who said during his Keynote that it is practically impossible to manually create a test database that is a true representation of a typical production enterprise database. The reasons he gave included the complexities of typical schemas involved and the permutations of database structures resulting from the combination of numerous business rules and circumstances as encountered in the real world.
Ben didn’t go further to explain how you could procure test data that accurately represents your production data so I will take the opportunity to suggest a possibility - data masking, of course!
A data masking tool, such as DataVeil, will take a copy of your production data and replace the sensitive data with realistic but fictitious data – preserving the real-world complexities of your production database. However, now that you have an anonymous copy of your production database, you can safely use it in non-secure environments without data privacy or security concerns.
Finally, congratulations to the winners of the Australian Software Testing Awards that were presented at the conference formal dinner!
