Ways to Create Data in Your Application ~ Test Automation is not the ultimate choice...

We may need large amount of data created to test the application smoothly. To test some of the scenarios we need large data sets. Testing with large data sets helps to even identify the application performance issues. This is an essential need when we need to load and stress test an application, mainly web and web services. There are many ways we can generate large chunks of test data.

The first thing that comes into our mind is to use an automation script to create say 100000 of users. Being a test automation professional I would not recommend this as the ultimate solution. There are more better ways that we can think upon. Lets look at some of the automated data pumping techniques.

• Use of database scripts - We ultimately create data which will be stored in the database. The best option is create data which is near to the database. So the ultimate way of creating a large chunk of data is to execute a database script (through SQL or Stored Procs) within the database. This is much more faster way to create data.
• Create a data on the gold image - Some of the organization have a gold image. Where the application and the database resides. When there is a deployment to any environment (dev, qa or pre-prod) they will deploy from the gold image. The better option is to create these test data in the gold image, if we practice such a strategy.

If test engineers do not have access to the application databases then the other options that we can use are;

• Create test data using the web services or APIs - We can create a test scenario in our web services test automation framework, which will create a bulk of data. This is the best choice if we prefer to create test data using test automation as compared to UI based automated test data creation. The creation is much faster as we directly access the web services we need to create data rather than transitioning many UI screens or pages.
• Use third party test data generating applications and APIs - There are many organizations which provides test data generation tools and applications which can be also directly connected with the database in your cloud or in your web application server. Where there is no need to have any intermediate human interaction. We can call these APIs with a simple test automation script, and the rest will be done by the third party API.
• The last option, UI automation of test data generation - For my experience this is the last option that we should rely on. We can create a script in test automation framework and execute it. Test data can be created by Excel sheets, JASON files or CSV files which will be utilized by the test automation framework.

Hope this article gave a better understanding for the readers on the options that we should opt when it comes to create big data for your testing needs.