Provide adapted test beds
There are obviously fundamental different requirements between providing test data for pre-prod, performance test and integration test environments when compared to providing test data for specific test cases. Data movement to test environments that deal with bulk data are focused on speed, efficiency and scheduled work flows. Whereas, test case data consist only in a few hundred records; how they are provided, inserted or loaded, is therefore irrelevant. What matters is manageability. How easy is it, to extract data consistently, to modify data fields, to replicate records, to add data manually, to create the modified objects, to adapt data excerpts to new data structures? Is a graphical interface available that supports these tasks?These are the questions developers ask.

Insofar as “near production” data serves as a base for this test data generation, the usual requirements on data privacy / security accordingly apply, see Safeguarding Privacy.