Skip to content

Generate Tests

Generate tests to automatically populate a test suite based on the latest profiling results for a table group. The system selects relevant test types, sets thresholds, and configures parameters based on the data types, patterns, and characteristics discovered in your columns.

Tip

Best practice is to regenerate tests every few weeks or when your data has evolved, so that test criteria stay aligned with current data characteristics.

Prerequisites

A test suite is required to generate tests. Use an existing test suite or create a new one from the Test Suites page.

How to

  1. Select Test Suites from the menu.
  2. On the test suite that you would like to generate tests for, click Generate Tests.
  3. In the dialog, select one or more Generation Sets, and click Generate Tests.

A generation set is a named group of test types. Standard covers the general-purpose test types and suits most test suites. Additional sets group test types for a specific industry — for example, the Commercial Pharma set. Select more than one set when a test suite needs test types from each.

TestGen remembers the generation sets you chose, so regenerating later starts from the same selection. A test suite that has never generated tests starts with Standard selected.

Warning

De-selecting a generation set removes its test types from the test suite. The next generation deletes that set's unlocked auto-generated tests. Before you confirm, the dialog names the sets you removed and how many tests will be deleted.

Adding a set can also remove tests: a domain-specific test type replaces the general-purpose test it supersedes on the same column. For example, a Commercial Pharma test replaces the Pattern Match test on that column. Whether the replacement applies depends on the profiled data, so the dialog reports how many unlocked auto-generated tests may be deleted at most.

Next steps

Once the test suite is populated, review the results on the Test Definitions page. From there you can fine-tune thresholds, add manual tests the system cannot auto-generate, and lock any tests you want to preserve across future regenerations.

When you're ready, continue with Run Tests to execute the tests.

Test lock mechanism

When you regenerate tests:

  • Unlocked auto-generated tests are refreshed — tests may be added or removed, and parameters like expected patterns, value ranges, and thresholds may change to reflect current data.
  • Locked auto-generated tests are preserved exactly as configured.
  • Manually created tests (including custom tests) are never affected by regeneration.
  • Locked auto-generated tests are also kept when you de-select their generation set — locking is how you preserve tests from a set you no longer generate.

Lock a test when you have manually tuned its parameters and want to preserve your changes across regenerations, or when you want to keep a test whose generation set you no longer select. To lock or unlock a test, navigate to the Test Definitions page and toggle the lock status.

TestGen includes 47 test types, plus 12 Commercial Pharma tests in TestGen Enterprise. See TestGen Test Types for the complete list and descriptions.