4 ms·
Please use real values in tests
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- salawat 5y agoGood luck! I've spent an inordinate amount of my career working out ways to make it dirt easy to get test data documented, traceable, and maintained. When your usability of your solution is good, people will use it, up to the point they can't fit the entire data model in their own head. Then you get the laze that creeps in. Fact is, most large production datasets end up being so bloody bloated, or data pipelines so bloody denormalized/convoluted, most developers check out mentally from the documentation/test data management/maintainence aspect of test data curation. My only theory as to why is because it is hard, and we glorify ignorance through praising abstraction and clever marketing like "serverless" that makes it seem like it isn't a big deal to know where your data ends up and how it gets there. You do need to understand the system. Yes, you can work on small chunks, but you need to be able to deal with it holistically. And if one more person tells me "but I'm different" they are getting a shoe thrown at them. Test data management is like the 2nd to last if not final boss of software testing as a general problem. You are implementing verifier machines that test the transitions of another from state x to state y for function f(x) = y. There are so many ways to wipe the raid, or do it wrong, or make it impossible for people to follow. If you don't understand your data provenance, you don't understand your system. Period.