On April 22, 2021, I delivered a talk entitled “Managing the Test Data Nightmare” at SauceCon 2021. SauceCon is Sauce Labs’ annual conference for the testing community. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was virtual, but I still felt a bit of that exciting conference buzz.
My talk covers the topic of test data, which can be a nightmare to handle. Data must be prepped in advance, loaded before testing, and cleaned up afterwards. Sometimes, teams don’t have much control over the data in their systems under test—it’s just dropped in, and it can change arbitrarily. Hard-coding values into tests that reference system tests can make the tests brittle, especially when running tests in different environments.
In this talk, I covered strategies for managing each type of test data: test case variations, test control inputs, config metadata, and product state. I also covered how to “discover” test data instead of hard-coding it, how to pass inputs into automation (including secrets like passwords), and how to manage data in the system. After watching this talk, you can wake up from the nightmare and handle test data cleanly and efficiently like a pro!
Here are some other articles I wrote about test data:
As usual, I hit up Twitter throughout the conference. Here are some action shots:
Many thanks to Sauce Labs and all the organizers who made SauceCon 2021 happen. If SauceCon was this awesome as a virtual event, then I can’t wait to attend in person (hopefully) in 2022!
Automation Panda 