Test Data Management Strategies for Test Automation in Drupal

There has been a lot of discussion regarding test automation and the advantages it may give when done appropriately. When automation in testing is discussed, we frequently hear about automated tools, proper coding methods, design patterns, flaky tests, and so on. Did you realise, however, that a strong test data management strategy is at the heart of any Test Automation framework? Unfortunately, this aspect is rarely discussed, and it is frequently one of the main causes of a failed test automation project.

In general, Arrange, Act and Assert are three broad phases for test automation. In this session, we'll concentrate on the first component – ARRANGE. What would be the most efficient method to test content types such as articles and blogs produced by numerous templates, for example? If you intend to do so using the user interface, you've completely misunderstood the situation. How can you assure that a listing page with numerous blogs has more complete and quicker test coverage? Once the data on the page has been generated by automatic techniques, all you have to do is browse to the appropriate page and make significant assertions.

Automated Test Data Management is critical to effective test automation for a variety of reasons, including decreased flakiness, quicker execution, and feedback, reducing false positives, and producing consistent and trustworthy test results, to mention a few. Content-heavy Drupal applications are the perfect candidates to implement automated TDM techniques and gain exponential returns. The immediate outcome is a better utilization of the team’s time – instead of struggling through the user interface to create content, the team can now use this time to add impactful tests (assertions).

In this session, we’ll talk about our experiences on:
Ramifications of not having a test data management (TDM) strategy in place as part of the test automation plan.
Good practices and anti-patterns related to TDM.
Factors to consider while creating the TDM strategy.
Better adoption of test automation by the entire team through collaboration.

Audience Takeaways:
Robust TDM techniques to automate tests for Drupal applications.
Leveraging these techniques to execute automated tests across environments (local, dev) and also the CI-CD pipeline.
Limitations and prerequisites for using these techniques.
A public GitHub repository comprising the techniques discussed in this session for hands-on.