To us Data is one of the most important part of Itsm testing and its important that you do it right. Think carefully about what data you use and how you use it.

ITSM solutions follow a workflow path which has a significant emphasis on the selection of the data to meet the use case that is being followed. The workflow is often driven by a combination of logged in users permissions, company and support group association, etc

So why wouldn’t you test it in the same way? We often see testers fall into the trap of testing ITSM implementations with their own user credentials and access rights which risks not finding defects because they either have elevated permissions that masks an issue or they actually don’t have the right permissions at all and end up following a path that avoids the data needed to locate the defect.

Other times, test teams will create a generic set of user profiles and associated data such as Tester 1 and Incident Management Group which will simply not cut it when you’re looking for ITSM solutions to trigger workflow of specific conditions., Furthermore, there is the challenge of testing with live data in a non Production environment which is often not sanctioned by data controllers or security teams of the systems. Using live data in a non production environment opens up the risk of exposing the data to unwanted eyes as non production environments are often less controlled than Production.

At Siamang Ltd, we look to take the existing production data and create a ‘test’ set that is modelled on the Production set. This allows us to turn “Joe Bloggs” into Tester 1 and provide the profile with all of the associations that the real Joe Bloggs would have, without exposing the true information. Joe Bloggs or now Tester 1 will be in the same support group with the same permissions and functional role as the real person but we simply don’t give away the full name or contact details. This is simply one example as there are many other types of data that require masking but can be delivered into non production environments in a masked way.

There is no easy way of testing ITSM data but the golden rule is to ensure that the modelling of test data is as close to the real thing as possible. That way you won’t have as many of those data issues at Go Live that you commonly see because data isn’t correct.

For a conversation on the best way to test ITSM data, get in touch with Siamang Ltd for some great advice.

The post ITSM data and how it is used within testing first appeared on Siamang ITSM Experts.