3 Test Data Management Best Practices to Improve Application Development

Today’s application development requires today’s test data management best practices. This is especially true for organizations embracing cloud-based application development. 

So, what can you do to improve your test data management practices? Start here, with our top best practices for test data management. 

Why Test Data Management Best Practices Must Evolve

DevOps and CI/CD pipelines need to move quickly. But application development teams are often left waiting for the test data they needed yesterday. This can slow down releases and introduce compliance risks. Productivity and workflows suffer, as does the ability to innovate.

Test data management can’t remain stuck in a bygone waterfall era. 

It needs to evolve and adapt, especially for enterprises who are running application development in the cloud.

Cloud-based application development brings unique hurdles that makes test data practices less efficient. 

Diverse Data Stores

Cloud-based microservices architecture have replaced the traditional monolithic data store with multiple, specialized databases. Every microservice has its own release train, infrastructure and storage are customized, and access is exclusive to each service.

Distributed Data Locations

Production data isn’t necessarily in the same location where test environments are configured. An enterprise application stack will have data sources on-premises and in multiple clouds, with both IaaS and PaaS deployments, to help save ballooning costs.

Demand for Test Environments

Manual processes for provisioning test data create bottlenecks, delaying development timelines. At the same time, developers face an increasing need for multiple, quick-access test environments to maintain project momentum.

Noncompliant Test Environments

The challenges of managing sensitive data in test environments are compounded by strict regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. The risks of non-compliance are severe. From financial penalties to reputational risks, it’s critical to ensure compliant data for DevOps. Yet many enterprise IT executives find it difficult to maintain data security and compliance in cloud-based test environments. 

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Adapting test data management best practices is essential. By modernizing your approach, you’ll enable faster, more secure data delivery while aligning with compliance requirements. Below, we’ll outline key strategies to help your organization stay ahead in the evolving landscape of cloud-native application development.

3 Test Data Management Best Practices You Need Today

#1: Automate and Virtualize Test Data for Efficiency, Cost Savings, and Quality

Frequent context switches and repetitive manual tasks kill efficiency. And to keep pace with CI/CD workflows, test data delivery must become embedded. Automated delivery of data accelerates software lifecycles, reducing wait times from weeks or months to minutes. The best solutions also enable ephemeral test environments, where a single call provisions data, boosting productivity and making it easier to manage cloud costs — one of the key benefits IT leaders see in cloud-based development.

Virtualizing test data further enhances agility by abstracting data from underlying storage, enabling easy transport across environments and reducing data sprawl. Developers gain independent, version-controlled datasets they can bookmark and refresh, improving troubleshooting and root cause analysis. 

Additionally, syncing different databases ensures accurate integration testing, even across thousands of microservices, improving software quality. 

#2: Eliminate Compliance Risk in Test Environments

Profiling and anonymizing are the two key components organizations must consider when using sensitive data in non-production environments. Security and CISO teams want to understand their implementation strategy, so it’s important to understand what data is being sought after and how it’s being masked.

Profiling is the process of searching your data sets for potentially sensitive information. When the dataset is small, DBAs or application teams might easily know where that data lives. However, as the dataset grows over years or decades, the application becomes more complex. Knowledge of where sensitive data is stored can be lost when employees leave the organization. Therefore, you need a reliable way to search your datasets. 

The next step is understanding what data is considered sensitive. Fortunately, various guidelines, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and DORA, can be followed and targeted by the profiling tool.  

Once you have identified what data you want to mask, next comes the actual process of doing so. First, it’s critical to understand the pros and cons of your masking approach because not all solutions are the same. Many data masking tools only obfuscate or hide sensitive data, meaning if data is leaked, hackers can still access it. We recommend choosing a tool that replaces the data itself, so it is no longer at risk no matter where it ends up. Lastly, your data is fluid and changing rapidly due to business needs and application changes. Therefore, you must ensure the practice is repeatable and efficient, per best practice #1.

Effective profiling and anonymizing provide a complete, joint solution to eliminate risk in your testing data and give your security teams confidence.

#3: Establish Company-Wide Data Management and Governance

A strong foundation for test data management requires company-wide involvement and governance frameworks to maintain strong security and easy administration:

Centralized Policies for Data Access

Early access control policies are often simple. But as your organization grows, custom models will need to be crafted to fit your team’s needs. Different groups, developers, compliance managers, or platform-specific admins will require different sets of permissions. Ensure you develop a standardized policy to govern how data is accessed, shared, and secured across teams while maintaining auditability.

Insights and Reports

As usage grows, you need to understand how your data is being used, track the risk profile of your data, and report the value being provided to the business. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” While data experts may prefer exporting their  metadata into a BI tool, do not underestimate the power of out-of-the-box reporting.

Single Solution

The introduction of various databases for different purposes makes it hard to govern them all. Each has their own command lines and best-of-breed interfaces. No one can learn them all. And now, with the growth of AWS, GCP, and Azure, we need to consider how we manage our Cloud resources. Enterprise organizations need a single offering that can manage their test data, no matter where it lives.

By implementing governance at an organizational level, businesses can align their test data practices with regulatory and security goals, simplify their test data management practices, and ensure they are constantly improving.

How Perforce Delphix Reinforces Test Data Management Best Practices

Perforce Delphix makes enforcing best practices easy with test data management solutions.

2x Faster Releases with Automated, Virtualized Test Data

Automate data provisioning times to reduce time-to-delivery and enable your CI/CD pipelines to scale more effectively.

Perforce Delphix Continuous Data — the data delivery solution for Perforce Delphix — enables you to easily move data from production to your downstream environments. On average, Delphix customers achieve 2x faster releases.

Reduce data sprawl by 10x and rehydrate your database in minutes, not days. As an added benefit, Delphix Continuous Data lets you store an immutable record of your data in case of catastrophe. 

77% Less Exposed Sensitive Data with Masking for Compliance

Irreversibly mask sensitive data with fictitious yet realistic values, ensuring full compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and other regulations.

Perforce Delphix Continuous Compliance — the data compliance/masking solution for Perforce Delphix — allows you to mask data in a reliable way. 

Continuous Compliance automatically profiles data, quickly finding sensitive data across a wide range of data sources, no matter how big the datasets. Then, it irreversibly masks data with fictitious yet realistic values to eliminate the risk of data re-identification all while maintaining referential integrity. 

Establish Company-Wide Data Management

Facilitate centralized policies for non-production environments with auditability. This ensures complete oversight of data usage across geographies and teams. 

Within the DevOps Data Platform,  Data Control Tower provides a single point of control for automation, compliance, governance, and administration. Use it to manage your entire data landscape across geographies, teams, and platforms using curated reports and filtered views. Craft a custom role-based access control model so your managers and self-service users have access to the data they need for your unique organization.

Case Studies in Test Data Management Success

Implementing test data management best practices has been critical for many organizations aiming to improve operational efficiency, enhance compliance, and accelerate innovation. Below, we explore three compelling case studies that highlight how businesses have transformed their development processes by adopting advanced test data management strategies with Perforce Delphix.

1. Trifecta Clinical

Trifecta Clinical faced significant bottlenecks due to inefficient data management. Spinning up new test data environments came with delays. 

By adopting the Delphix DevOps Data Platform, Trifecta Clinical revolutionized its data operations. Delphix enabled them to provision and refresh non-production data in minutes instead of hours. 

The results?

• 4x Increase in Non-Production Environments: Developers and testers gained immediate access to high-quality data without increasing storage.
• 20% Improvement in Early Bug Detection: Teams identified and resolved issues early in the development cycle, reducing costs and improving application quality. 

2. Gain Capital

Gain Capital needed to streamline their development cycles and enhance operational efficiency to remain competitive. Creating fresh data environments took up to four hours per project, bottlenecking development and delaying crucial initiatives.

Gain Capital implemented Delphix to virtualize and govern their data, enabling faster access and delivery for their development teams.

The results?

• 97% Reduction in Data Provisioning Time: Setup times dropped from four hours to just three minutes.
• 30+ Developers Empowered with Self-Service Access: Teams accessed data directly without administrator intervention, enhancing productivity.
• Faster Project Delivery: A complex archiving process was completed in six weeks instead of six months. 

Gain Capital’s transformation showcases the power of fast and agile test data automation in driving faster development cycles and achieving business targets.

3. ITOCHU Techno-Solutions

For ITOCHU Techno-Solutions, testing environments required the latest production data, but delays in preparing these environments meant extended lead times and inefficient workflows.

By leveraging the Delphix DevOps Data Platform, ITOCHU reduced the time to prepare test environment data from 17 days to just one hour. 

The results?

• 94% Reduction in Lead Time: Faster access to production-like data improved project timelines and productivity.
• 30% Reduction in Development Man-Hours: Teams eliminated redundant processes, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks.
• Enhanced Test Quality: Matching production data improved the accuracy and reliability of testing processes. 

IDC Study: 58% Faster Time to Develop an Application with Perforce Delphix

A recent IDC study* — The Business Value of Delphix — found that customers on average develop an application 58% faster while using Delphix. On top of that, they find $8.4M in additional revenue through productivity gains.

Get the IDC White Paper

Automate and Enforce Test Data Management Best Practices with Perforce Delphix

Delphix was built around industry best practices for test data management. Never choose between compliance, quality, and speed. Schedule a no-pressure, custom demo of Delphix with one of our experts to see how Delphix can help you adopt today’s test data management best practices.

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This blog was originally published by Lenore Adam on March 29, 2021. Since then, it has been expanded and updated by Nick Mathison on March 21, 2025.

*IDC White Paper, sponsored by Delphix, The Business Value of Delphix, doc #US52560824, December 2024.