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Whitepaper
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Test data management (TDM) presents a significant challenge for organizations. Procuring, owning, and securing test data is both a requirement and a liability. Without proper test data, achieving high test coverage is difficult. Yet test data contains sensitive information that poses financial and legal risks if misused or leaked.
Teams are often left waiting for test data to be produced, causing delays. Survey data shows up to 60% of development time is devoted to data-related tasks, and 20% of the software development lifecycle is lost waiting for data. Organizations need a maintainable process to procure adequate data while keeping it safe.
Traditional test data collection methods have significant drawbacks. The most obvious approach is collecting data from running production systems by cloning the production database. While this data has the right content and characteristics, it’s the least secure and can contain sensitive customer information that could be compromised.
Another option is using a partial subset of the production database, which means less data to manage but suffers from the same privacy and security concerns. Data synthesis is a possible alternative, but generating data in proper form requires domain knowledge and expertise that may not be available.
Testers can quickly create test data by capturing, masking, and repurposing realistic data from interactions between real and virtualized components in existing systems.
There must be a maintainable way to procure adequate data while keeping it safe. Intelligent masking of any real data used is essential.
Instead of centralized test data management systems, testers must be able to access, manage, model, and generate just the right data for their needs. Self-service for each tester is essential.
A better approach helps infer what the actual data looks like from traffic, reducing the learning curve required to take advantage of test data.
Data sources represented as flat files are harder to understand than hierarchical, visual presentations. Complex data objects with parent-child relationships become more intuitive and easier to restructure.
Parasoft’s self-service web portal enables multiple team members to access, manage, model, and generate test data for their needs. The solution tightly couples with SOAtest for functional test automation and Virtualize for service virtualization, allowing you to take generated data and use it in tests through virtual interfaces like REST services or virtual databases.
Capture live traffic data to create test data models to use with virtual services.
Parasoft’s test data management technology is augmented with service virtualization. A key example is replacing reliance on a shared database by swapping it with a virtual service. This allows for parallel and independent testing that would otherwise conflict.
The service virtualization engine extends the power of TDM by allowing testers to generate, subset, mask, and create individual customized test data for their needs. By replacing shared dependencies such as databases, service virtualization removes the infrastructure and complexity required to host the database environment. This enables isolated test suites and the ability to cover extreme and corner cases.
Although virtualized dependencies are not the real thing, some actions—for example insert and update operations on a database—add complexity to virtualization.
Virtualize and a test data management system like DatProf can be combined as well. Service virtualization is ideal when isolating the application from dependencies that restrict the flexibility of testing, and in cases where it’s impractical, the traditional test data management solution makes sense for testing dependencies such as the application database. The combination of these two approaches is ideal for complementing the strengths of each approach.
The self-service portal enables you to capture, mask, model, and subset test data. This enables teams to increase productivity and reduce resource constraints by testing with virtual data instead of the actual database.
After capturing transactions and data, there is full control over the contents of the data from within the data manager. In addition, a model is abstracted automatically from the data based on database extraction or through the interactions observed during the recordings. This model, as illustrated below, allows for better understanding of the data structure and relationships. This understanding is key to the next steps of masking, generating, and subsetting.
Navigate, edit, and manipulate data structures in Parasoft’s thin-client interface to reduce the amount of time spent looking for the right data.
Service virtualization shares data between test tools and the service virtualization layer to fully test an app and not be constrained by backend systems. It uses simplified data storage rather than full schemas, which speeds up prototyping for better agility.
Built on top of a lightweight data storage mechanism, Parasoft’s test data management solution lets you share and access data from a remote repository, where you can easily manage, manipulate, and used it in test cases and virtual services.
Alter the shape of complex hierarchical data, such as adding/removing occurrences and excluding parts of data, without having to update the database schema or service definition.
Model data objects and generate new data quickly. Create data on the fly for your test cases and virtual services, and free up your reliance on a centralized data management team.
Data masking/obfuscation secures test data to make it usable in test environments and helps you leverage production data by securing the data after recording.
Augment existing service virtualization strategy with flexible test data that automatically builds meaningful models by simply creating virtual services.
Leverage data subsetting to carve out specific data sets from newly abundant data available, reducing overall data storage required by selecting just the data that’s required. Generate, subset, then destroy.
Test data is hard to procure and a risk to manage. A method based on secure, real data capture provides the best solution for attaining the data. Service virtualization provides additional benefits in capturing this data earlier in the development process.
Parasoft’s modernized test data management solution provides secure storage and management of this test data while allowing testers without in-depth domain knowledge to customize the data sets for their needs. Simplifying test data management reduces the risk and liability of using production data plus reduces overall project risk and costs.
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