Test Data Management in Agile / DevOps

With Agile and DevOps gaining momentum over traditional Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methods, testing can no longer wait to take the center stage. Various testing activities needs to be initiated right at the start and is to be done continuously for faster sprints. Test Data Management (TDM) - one of the critical task of testing - has also evolved over a period of time. Gone are the days when test data was made available mostly by DBA’s or manually created by business users in an ad hoc manner. It was neither adequate nor optimum to provide 100% coverage to all test scenarios. Manual masking of sensitive data always had the risk of compliance breach. There were no standard mechanism and different teams would provision same data differently and redundantly. In addition, test environment refresh would be very few and could make the environments stale. All this would adversely impact the quality of testing and overall product / application.

In today’s business context, testing teams strive to have control over provisioning of test data. They want to have the test data available on demand automatically giving full coverage to all there scenarios. These enterprise wide TDM systems backed by industry standard tools have reduced the test cycle times improving quality of testing drastically.

Typical TDM features in modern Test Data Management systems

· Self Service Desk / Portal providing Test Data On Demand

Majority of the data to be available automatically through self-service portal as and when demanded by testing teams reducing dependency on various TDM teams.

·Gold Copy Architecture

Readily available Intelligent, Optimal, Masked and Integrity maintained subsets of production data which can be made available for multiple use

·  Automation

Whether or not the data provisioned from production systems are synthetic data created from scratch, the process is increasingly getting automated. Test data needs have become so dynamic and test scenarios so complicated, the manual process of test data is getting into a phase of permanent coma, and the entire process of test data management is increasingly getting automated

Evolution of Synthetic Test Data Creation

Big vendors such as Informatica ILM, and IBM Optim traditionally had dominated the world of test data. Increasingly, we see there are niche players who made a mark with offerings that can match the best. Cost and implementation time frames are the deciding factors in finalizing tools. Tools which can connect to a diverse array of sources like packaged applications, legacy systems are in demand.