Impact of the GDPR on Software Testing

As you all know that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is coming in Few days and We can’t ignore it.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one regulation that any development teams can’t ignore. We have to be compliant with these regulations.

If you are collecting user information, any personal Information like name, email, phone and other in your databases and putting them in your staging environment for Testing purpose or Production like Test data. You need to read below point to save it for GDPR. It would be better to remove or delete/mask it completely.

What is GDPR?
The General Data Protection Regulation regulates how companies protect EU residents’ personal data. It goes into effect on May 25, 2018. For every breach after that point, companies could incur fines of up to 4 percent of the company’s annual global turnover or €20 million (whichever is greater). Wow.

How to stay away from GDPR, Testers point of view?

• Don’t Use Production’s Copy of Test-data if it includes some Sensitive or personal information.
• Use Mocked or Dummy data sometimes we can them synthetically generate the test data while Testing in Staging.
• If you have used the Production’s data in Staging and it is breached make sure you convey to respective authority.
• You can use extract and mask technique, which basically has Production like a database but full masked and does not make any sense in real life.

So In a nutshell, Make sure as a tester in your Testing Procedure is compliant too to GDPR along with your Company.

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