Sub-setting

Sub-setting DEFINITION

**Subsetting is a method of selecting a predefined data sub-set necessary for testing some particular development iteration of the code at specified environment.

DEVELOPMENT LIFECYCLE

Let's consider the data origination and movement in the development lifecycle.

FIRST ITERATIONS. Coding from scratch.

Any development starts with the idea, which translates into code, and this code is tested with some data. Test use cases define which data to use and create. At this stage, it is important to find data sources, and the random data masking components that contain data sets are provide easy means to usecreate for this purpose.data. Such are Address, First and Last Names, Social Security Number, etc., as well is the 'regular expression' component. The amount of data necessary to do tests in that stage of the development is usually the bare minimum, and is used mainly for functional requirements. Of course, non-functional requirements are taken into account in the architecture, but the time to test them is usually on a bigger and more system-like environment than the developer's sandbox.

This development stage is the first iteration of code.

TEST ENVIRONMENTS

When the first iteration of code is complete, often times developers push the code to the continuous integration environment and/or to the testers who do testing manually or in automated mode/ In such environments, the amount of test cases increases to test code regression and some non-functional requirements such as ease of product use, security, etc. Continuous integration environments are used in the teams with best practices based on method of Grady Booch and adopted by extreme programming agile methodology.