Test Data Management - Parasoft Virtualize

Avoid Testing Conflicts With Virtual Test Data

In today’s world of modern software architectures, software applications integrate to data sources via APIs. And in many cases, these data sources are shared across multiple applications and teams. When teams start testing applications with a dependency on shared data sources, conflicts and data pollution can impact efforts to run automated regression testing in a reliable manner.

It is often realized that the issue wasn’t a real bug, but rather a data or environmental problem that caused the tests to fail. Traditional test data management techniques aren’t getting the job done, and there is a real cost impact to the business.

Data-Driven Testing

Up to 60% of application development and testing time is devoted to data-related tasks.

Test Data Impacts

Inefficiencies in test data provisioning cause project cost overruns of 46% and schedule impacts of 71%.

Development Life Cycle

20% of the average SDLC is lost due to required test data not being created or available when needed.

Extend Your Virtualization Power With Synthetic Test Data

Each application team needs shared test data that sits behind APIs. Service virtualization enables teams to independently control their own virtual data and sandboxes, which allows them to more easily drive higher levels of test automation that just isn’t practical with traditional methods.

Parasoft’s test data management technology extracts data from existing systems so you can quickly manage, mask, model, and generate additional data. With Parasoft’s self-service interface, you can easily reuse test data in your virtual services, reducing the time you spend doing test data management.

How Does It Work?

Parasoft’s modern approach to test data combines test data management with service virtualization to deliver data simulation. This approach allows users to simplify the process of understanding what data is available by leveraging the recordings made while creating virtual services. Parasoft’s test data management technology automatically generates data models from interactions in your system, and automatically infers information about the data to make it easier for non-technical users to get the test data they need.

Through a sleek browser-based UI, users can then take their data models and mask the sensitive data, generate additional data for use in their virtual services, as well as snapshot the data to easily roll forwards and backwards in time. This approach to test data is significantly more approachable than traditional test data management solutions because the majority of the complexity in traditional TDM comes from deriving the data model, whereas in the Parasoft ecosystem, that happens automatically.

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Features

Build on your existing virtualization strategy

Parasoft’s test data solution doesn’t require users to depend on a test data management team with specialized skills and tools. Parasoft’s unique approach to test data management gives you direct control over your environment through service virtualization. Your application can be integrated to virtual services under your control where the generation, masking, or subsetting of data can easily be done without worrying about complex databases. Parasoft Virtualize can store and manage all the data in its proprietary data repository system. This lightweight data storage mechanism makes it much easier to load, mutate, reset, and utilize data without the tediousness of dealing with SQL queries.

Simplify virtual service creation

Rapidly build virtual services on the fly, and inject them with business logic and test data to support local application development. Parasoft’s REST API can also be used to develop workflows that automatically manage those virtual services and deploy them to your virtual test lab.

Parasoft’s virtual services benefit from a file-based configuration, making them easy to share between development and QA for defect reproduction and support.

Simplify virtual service management

Test data gets stale over time, and can be challenging with other solutions to continuously re-record new use cases into your virtual services. With Parasoft, you can set rules that define what every new day’s data looks like, and then use a simple UI or a command line statement to generate today’s safe test data. This makes it much easier to have virtual services that hold changing data over time and reduces overall maintenance because you don’t have to manually update all that data.

Make sure you're working with safe test data

Parasoft Virtualize’s service virtualization enables users to capture data from any environment. Some of the best data exists in our production environments, but we can’t just pull that data directly from production because it represents too much risk. With Parasoft, you can extract data from anywhere and then apply a masking process to that data, thus sanitizing it for use in test environments and making the overall process of service virtualization much easier, with many new possibilities for data gathering.

Manage the data in your real databases

Do more with virtual data! Clone, subset, and mask your real environment data so you can create the right conditions in your test database and then leverage that data inside of your simulated services.

Benefit from the Parasoft Approach

Virtual services that are easier to own

By building a smaller virtual service from the beginning and then loading it with all the necessary data by generating synthetic data, it’s much easier to own your virtual services while reducing maintenance.

Easier to do negative testing

Sometimes you want to be able to reproduce a defect, but that data just doesn’t exist in the real environment. By loading synthetic data into your virtual services, you can generate all sorts of wild responses that could never exist in reality. This will make it much easier for you to build reproductions because you can simulate exactly the responses are looking for.

Automatically heal your data

Statefully driving your virtual services is a great way to simulate real transactions that alter the underlying data, so you can validate changing data over time, but getting your data back into the proper shape can be a challenge. Parasoft lets you snapshot a golden state of your data, which you can alter through usage and reset right back to its original starting point with a series of simple API calls.

See the Value of Parasoft Virtualize

Want to see how much service virtualization can benefit your testing processes?

Use this handy calculator to assess how Parasoft Virtualize can help you decrease the time and costs of application testing by reducing constraints in the environment.

Just enter the number of people on your development and testing teams along with inputs for test environments, defects, and delivery delays. You’ll get a calculation that projects the value of the potential benefits you could experience by implementing the Parasoft service virtualization solution in your organization.

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