Tool for test data generation

Software engineers struggle to find proper test data to test software products within time-to-market period. Under-tested software will not only cost a lot of time and effort for customers but also incur huge expenses for the company. Two major causes for not generating proper test data are lack of skills and insufficient time to prepare. The aim of this project is to develop a tool called Test Data Generation Tool (TDGT) that assists software testers in generating proper test data with minimal efforts. It provides mechanisms to read company-specific data sources as well as generic data sources such as flat files, EXCEL spreadsheets, XML documents and SQL Server databases. In addition TDGT helps software testers generate test data quickly so that they can spend more time finding bugs in the software rather than preparing test data. TDGT provides a rich user interface to design and execute the data generation task, and hence even a new tester can use this tool with minimal effort. TDGT can also be used to transfer data from one data source to other data sources. Such move is quite common to satisfy day-to-day business needs of testing department in a software company. Another usage of this tool is to view Unicode data for all the supported data sources mentioned above. This project also provides primitive metrics to help testers understand the process of test data generation