Test Data Management (TDM) is the process for providing controlled data access to modern teams throughout the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).

Why is TDM important? Modern Test Data Management solutions help organizations accelerate application development speed, code quality, data compliance, and sustainability initiatives by providing timely access to fresh relevant data downstream for code development, automated tests, troubleshooting, and validation.

Managing Sensitive Data Test data management helps teams to administer security controls such as data masking, authorization, authentication, fine grained data access management, and audits logs in downstream environments as part of test data management processes. This helps organizations quickly meet compliance and data privacy regulations at test data provisioning, while also reducing data friction for Dev and software test teams.

Best Practices for Test Data Management A comprehensive approach should seek to improve test data management in the following areas:

• Data delivery: reducing the time to deliver test data to a development team or test team

• Data quality: meeting requirements for high-fidelity test data

• Data security: minimizing security risks without compromising speed

• Infrastructure costs: lowering the costs of storing and archiving test data.

Test Data Management in Nextens adhere to multiple practices based on a team's demand.

Our teams are grouped into 3 different areas:

1. Boost/Fiscaal Area

   Team Portal: Within team portal we make a distinction between 'API' tests and integration tests.

   The 'API tests' live within the repo of the subject api and only make use of endpoints within that api. The integration tests are on a higher level, have their own repo and pipeline and can use different api's within the same testscenario.

   API tests use either prepared testdata that has been set up on the test environments by the testers (for example: setup a client on each environment to create a tax decleration when testing the taxReturnFileAPI) or if possible with endpoints within the api create testdata during the tests (for example: create a client while testing the clientAPI) to avoid dependencies with other API's

   Integration test can use all the api's maintained by Team Portal so those tests should create and cleanup their testdata during execution where possible.

   Note: At the moment of writing selecting random data from list endpoints is still used in older tests, we are actively moving away from this to make the tests more reliable

   Team Advice: Team Advice maintains 1 API: intelligenceAPI. Within this api it's not possible to create testdata so the testdata is created by the testers and used by the automatic tests. This contains clients and aangiftes created according to the specs mentioned in the advice excel sheets.

   Note: There are some tests for versioning that use the aangifte api to change data because we have no other choice. Setting up data on the fly for every test would take up to much runtime and make the tests over complicated.

   Team Fiscal: Current fiscal tests create testdata on the fly using the UI. With the new portal UI we want to step away from that and use API calls to speed up the tests and make them more reliable.

2. SMB Area SMB DataHub DataHub in Nextens is a product that collects data from external parties so it can be used by consumers like Advice (to create advice signals) and other parties to create for example benchmarks. Because of the nature of this product to test this we don't use our own test data. So for DataHub test data management is not a requirement. SMB workflow For this team I had a chat with Niels de Winter and after I described the concept of Data management he expained that only for KVK cache this could be relevant.

3. Naslag Area For this team we have user subscriptions for which we use different user accounts. They are maintained by Naslag team. Apart from this there are no sensitive data used for Naslag area.