How Can I Get Data for Testing Purposes?

Question

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on some tests and need data for testing purposes. Specifically, I need things like names, emails, birthdays, and other personal details for creating realistic test scenarios.

What are the best ways or tools to generate or obtain this data? Are there any resources or web-based tools that can help me generate random data automatically?

Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You could surely do that with almost an A.I. give it a go!

Answer 2

how about https://www.kaggle.com/datasets to see what's in there? or some university repositories - google them out, simply, as there are many different ones (eg you can check Uni of California Irvine, UCL from UK etc.)

Otherwise you can try GPT / Claude / DeepSeek to generate you some (and refine them as you go), depending on what type of data you need / what columns you need / what variables you need.

Also, sometimes simple googling out can yield results at various Reddits, stack overflow etc.

Answer 3

james alery unless you need big data sets for large-scale testing, it's usually not hard to just create some random GOOD data.

The one part you will want to pay attention to is creating BAD data.
To test that your program can recognize it and behave correctly to reject it, fix it, or send it back to user for correction.
If you work on the same type of projects repeatedly, you will build up a manually created set of test data over time.

One cardinal rule of programming is assume all input is potentially bad and must be validated.

As a side bit, if you need a block of text to test page formatting, "lorem ipsum" has been used for centuries. Here is generator for it.

https://loremipsum.io/