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In my company, we use a separate test environment where we copy production data daily. This environment is periodically used to detect issues like the ones you have encountered. The vast majority of our testing is carried out with synthesized, non-production data. Some of this is produced by hand, but most is produced by scripts we build. We periodically ...

I've done this in many places myself, where we copied over production data because it was so very useful in troubleshooting issues that were only apparent in Customer data and it also provided additional test scenarios and data structures that we did not then need to always recreate. It's extremely useful, and if your Development Team is balking at this you ...

One alternative I have seen is to have the company set up a "test" environment within their domain, then give specific personnel within your company access to it. That setup provides two benefits: it provides a pre-deployment test environment to evaluate new versions directly against production data in a protected environment and also provides a platform to ...

It really depends on the type of company you are, or the products you are testing. It also goes to your testing approach. Are you basing your tests on the data available, or are you creating data required by your tests. IMHO, the most effective way is to get a copy of production data, and perform analysis on it. De-duplicate the data. Perform "equivalence ...

I haven't heard of a standardized term for this technique, but it is commonly used. We do this pretty regularly at my current company, but avoided it almost completely when I worked at Microsoft, even though there were a number of cases where it could have greatly improved our ability to troubleshoot issues. At Microsoft, they considered the risk of ...

Some tools for test data generation - online and standalone: Datagenerator - free tool, DB data / tables generation. GenerateData.com - free online script-based data gen, different output formats, including CSV, Excel and SQL. Spawner Data Generator - sample/test data for databases. More links may be found here, but the above 3 I use more often and ...

Test data generators are especially useful when the data format is likely to change. Here is a common problem I've encountered with test data: it isn't always clear which parts of the data are intentional and which are optional. For example, suppose you want to test a CSV file of names and addresses, where each record contains a first name, last name, ...

At my current company, we are a small team. We have designated a shared folder on the file system where we place these types of test assets. And we each maintain them on an as-needed basis. This approach works well enough for us. At other companies where I have worked, I had a larger team. In some of those cases, one of the roles was that of a "Test Lab ...