Is database knowledge beneficial for software tester?

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#1

I waant to know whether database knowledge beneficial for software tester or not. Can nayone please tell me.

#3

Hi @rahulr,

Let me answer your question.

Yes, Database knowledge is beneficial for a software tester.

A software tester needs to be concerned with the testing environment also known as staging environment or QA environment. As a part of best practice, it is always recommended to have a dedicated QA environment for software testers.

What is a Staging environment?

People reply to that question with a varied definition. Some would say “it is a copy of production”. “An environment similar to prod but without any customer.” I define it as a mirror environment meant to mimic production as precisely as possible for quality assurance. I consider it to be a Goalkeeper, standing tall as the last line of defense between the bugs brought in by the recent release process and the production environment.

And before you ask, Yes, staging environment should have a complete simulated copy of databases as well.

Staging database is a matter of concern to any software tester – A database that is replicated from production to maintain a staging environment as close to production as possible. Keep the following in mind as a software tester:

  1. Perform constant monitoring on the staging database. Monitoring helps you to prevent any code deployment above the threshold limit offering state stability, ultimately preventing the QA from going erratic.

  2. Live data from production should not be missing - Remember, the aim of staging is to replicate as much of production on it. So customer data is not something that you can dummy out. Rather than running a test on empty tables, you need to fill the staging database with as much data as your production database in handling to have an estimate of your latest schema capabilities. There are tools available in the market for supporting you with this.

  3. Performance parameters should be accurately simulated-often the result of test cases is not as fast in Production as it is in staging. This happens because your Staging is not facing real-time internet traffic, but your Production environment does. So you can’t encounter Race conditions, Load handling, performance tracing, and deadlocks in the QA environment. The good news is that there are tools for that purpose too.

  4. Make sure to have an Isolated staging server & database-hosting them on the same place as our production is a major mistake that not only brings confusion but also risks data leakage & disruption as a whole.