When developing new functionality or expanding existing features, members of the feature team can find themselves battling a hidden enemy — bad test data. In this article, I am going to talk about the challenges of not having adequate test data for feature validation and offer some options to avoid falling into this hidden sinkhole that can absorb a team's success rate.
How Bad Data Is Bad?
One of the first topics of discussion when starting a new project is to understand the source of the non-production data sources, which will be used to validate a feature team's work. Nothing scares me more to hear something like, "We have a test database that was created from production a few years ago."