Home Glossary Test data Test data The A-Z of Privacy Test data: Test data (development data) is data used in a non-production environment to test an application during development and before deploying it into production. It is often difficult to generate test data that is realistic and rich enough to reproduce all use cases and edge cases, so many organizations prefer to use real data in their test and development environments. However, this poses a major privacy risk. De-identifying the data mitigates this risk, while retaining the real-world characteristics that make real data valuable for representative testing. Return to glossary
