Static vs Dynamic Test Data

[ccox]

I work for a company who has many users with different products associated to different accounts.  Recently, my company has become intrigued with automation testing and we are beginning the stages of planning out our approach. One of the questions we are facing right now is whether we want to use static(controlled) data or dynamic data.  Static data would require more maintenance to keep it controlled, but dynamic data would require us to build more conditional scripts.  

I would love to hear your opinions of the pros and cons of using static versus dynamic data, as well as which you prefer and why.

Thanks!

[softwaretestingforum]

Does application have different feature for different account? If yes then it makes sense testing with different accounts. I assume that you would know in advance about the features associated with any account hence depending on the account your test steps would very. You may like to see data driven capabilities of TestNG - http://testng.org/doc/documentation-main.html#parameters-dataproviders

You may pass a flag along with account data which decides the path/features to be used for the account.

[ccox]

Customers have their own features and their accounts have their own as well.  The customer relationships with these accounts vary as well. Most of the accounts they have are similar.  I have been using Selenium IDE scripts and created them in a way to handle all situations using flow control.  Then I can use any customer randomly.  These scripts are used mostly for data creation and we manually verify the end results( definitely beats manually doing all of it).  This sounds like it is probably not the best idea though?  My concern with using controlled data(where we know all of the attributes) is that it could change unless we put a process in to keep them from updating.  It also means our tests would be hitting only a singular flow each time.  I don't know if this is much of a problem since we can build more scripts to handle the other scenarios though.  It sounds like not matter what I do, I should have some form of controlled data.  Is that accurate?

We are also trialing a few commercial tools to see which one works best for the organization.  We are still bouncing the idea of WebDriver around, but we do have some client apps that Selenium can't support.  I will look into TestNG and see if it may suit our needs.

[softwaretestingforum]

I see eye to eye with your assessment. I would have also implemented multiple scenarios and depending on data (or some other attribute) would have introduced flow control.

I am just curious to what are those app features which can not be automated using Selenium. Is a windows app?

~ tarun