Data-driven testing

You can efficiently cover your testing surface if you use a data-driven testing approach. For example, when writing JMeter test plans, you can use the CSV configuration element to read in variables from text files. This allows JMeter to read out parameters from your CSV files, such as hostname, and transverse your infrastructure. This enables one test plan to attack many servers. The same is true for SoapUI; by adding an Excel data source and looping through the rows, you can test an application with many different test users who each have a range of roles. Data-driven testing has a tendency to be maintainable. During refactoring, instead of changing your test plan as the URLs in your application change, you can factor the URLs out into CSV files.