The majority of such IT solutions can be software while there can be others such as hardware, web related services, data analysis related services etc. That is why software developing companies have high demand and it is utmost priority for them to deliver the high quality products. To ensure that, software testing is the must to perform, the software developing companies use their in-house testing teams or external (virtual) to do so. The testing team should ensure quality of the software product, and they have to take more responsibility on releasing all possible error free software product. Software testing includes many complex processes that are unique. Few examples would be collect data that is required for testing (test data), manage test data, set up testing environment, manage test data and environment bookings, managing releases and more. Basically, the testing process depends on the quality and reliability of the testing data.
After the test data requirements have been acquired through an analysis, test data gathering phase is conducted. Possible and regular problems faced during this task is, identifying and accessing distinctive databases which have the required test data. Plenty of time and effort would be needed to consume at this phase to perform the task as to get data from end user's environment requires more time and effort (as there are more parties involved, more accesses to be granted etc). As a consequence, data that is gathered to test the software may include sensitive information such as telephone numbers, addresses, credit card details, SSN or any other information that should be strictly kept with high privacy. A task called test data privatizing/masking is conducted on these cases to protect the confidentiality of such test data.
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