A glance at industry research from recent years shows that test data remains one of the major bottlenecks to fix in DevOps and CI/CD:

The most recent Continuous Testing Report found that the average test team spends a massive 44% of their time finding, waiting for, or making test data.[i] The 2021-22 World Quality Report found that incomplete test data continues to undermine software quality, as organizations still lack sufficient data for all of their testing.[ii] Test data practices further pose costly compliance risks, as testers at 45% of organizations admit that they do not always follow security and privacy regulations for test data.[iii]

We have written extensively elsewhere on techniques for making complete and compliant data available on the fly to testers, developers, automation frameworks, and CI/CD pipelines. This article will highlight a principle underpinning many of these techniques, which is often missing from test data strategies today. Let’s call this missing ingredient of test data success “the democratization of data.”