White Paper

Why You Need Test Data Management

Test data management might not sound sexy, but if a flawed, poorly tested
application tanks your business, youll wish youd given it a lot more attention.

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This edition published March 2014

White Paper

Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Garbage in, garbage out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
What is test data management? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Cognizants experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Why Informatica? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Why You Need Test Data Management

Introduction
Problematic application releases such as the Knight Capital trading software glitch in August 20121 and the
bumpy rollout of Healthcare.gov in late 2013 serve as cautionary tales in the annals of enterprise IT history. A
software bug that costs a brokerage firm $440 million in half an hour catches peoples attention. But a solution
to the ber-technical problem of generating test data to empower proper, thorough, speedy, secure application
testing as part of the development lifecycle? Not so much.
Its a rare exec who sits bolt upright in a cold sweat at 3 am over the sudden realization that great testing
tools are precisely what has been lacking all this time, says Joshua Greenbaum, principal analyst at
Enterprise Application Consulting. Thats because the rest are sleeping the sleep of the ignorant.
Project failure is really death by a thousand cuts, and one of the issues that cuts deeply is the problem
with software testing.
There are myriad problems with software testing, Greenbaum notes, but a big one is that test data is given low
priority and executed using last centurys tools and last weeks college graduates.
Not all companies are using old-school approaches to application development and testing, of course. Most
enterprises have embraced Agile methodologies based on iterative, incremental development. Agile replaces
the waterfall approach of old, and, when executed as intended, delivers mind-numbingly fast development
cycles (called sprints)particularly important in the race for adding features and keeping pace in the mobile
and cloud spaces.
Unfortunately, however, the number of sprints in any Agile project magnifies inefficiencies and increases
costs related to test data management. So if youre not applying Agile in testing, or if you leave test data
management as an afterthought, or if youre still using manual methods for generating test data, the lowered
cost and increased speed you thought youd get from Agile development move beyond your reach. Why
adopt Agile if youre going to use outdated methods of generating test data? Manual test data creation
methods cant keep up with todays agile, dynamic environment, nor can they protect you from the risk of
accidentally testing with sensitive data.

Garbage in, garbage out

That phrase is probably too simplistic to fully encompass what happens when you attempt to develop an
application without quality test data. But its not far off. As Greenbaum notes, its a rare exec who fully
understands how skimping in this area can backfire in the long run. Consider the specifics of life without an
automated test data management solution:
Wasted time, high costs. Gartner reports that development and testing, when compared with other activities,
consume the largest slice of time24 percent, or almost a quarterin an application development
lifecycle.2 In a recent survey conducted by Informatica3, tasks associated with managing test datadefining
test data to be used in a test case, copying or creating test data, securing or masking sensitive data, and
so onare taking up more than half a developers and QA teams time during the testing phase. Clearly,
for enterprises engaged in hundreds of application development lifecycles at any given time, the manual
process of creating and provisioning test data is inefficient and costly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group

Gartner IT Key Metrics Data, December 2011

TechValidate. TVID: 988-ED5-CCD

 Inefficient operations. When testers copy full product data sets multiple times to facilitate their testing,
inefficient development cycles result. Its not only time-consuming for testers, but also interferes with IT
operations. Worse, you need costly compute and storage resources to support the hundreds of database
copies that multiple testers need to access in the test lab.
Data privacy risks. When you manually generate test data or simply copy data from production systems,
data privacy suffers. You may, for example, be copying and distributing personal health information,
payment card information, and other personally identifiable information throughout test environments
without masking it. Which means sensitive data is exposed to applications testers who may or may not be
authorized to access or motivated to safeguard it. All of this jeopardizes your brand, revenues and customer
loyalty, and exposes you to regulatory penalties and class-action lawsuits.
Unreliable, unpredictable testing. Each test iteration may require new test data or data that does not
yet exist. Creating new test data manually causes delays and introduces data creation tasks that arent
repeatable or consistent. Depending on the timing (for example, at a retailer during the holiday buying
season), IT wont want to risk accessing production systems for sample data.

Development with and without test data management

Improve efficiency, reduce test cycles, and improve application quality

Without Test Data Management

Define Test Data Requirements

Provision Test Data

Test Execution

Tester Efficiency
Cost Per Test Cycle = $2.7M
100 Days, 300 Testers, $90/hour
20% application defects due to bad test data

Production
Application

Application quality
Cost of a defect found later in the release cycle = XX

With Test Data Management

Define Test Data
Requirements

Provision
Test Data

Improve Tester Efficiency by 30%

Cost Per Test Cycle = $1.6M
60 Days, 300 Testers, $90/hour
90% reduction in test data-related defects
Cost avoidance

Improve Tester Efficiency by > 30%

Test Execution
Production
Application

Reduce Testing cycles by > 25%

Improve application quality by 90%

Why You Need Test Data Management

ARE YOU A TDM

CANDIDATE?
If you answer yes to two
or more of the following
questions, you could benefit
from TDM and data masking
solutions
Are your testers and

developers unable to or
wasting time to get the
data they want, when
they want it?

Are bugs being uncovered

in production because
testers could not test
every scenario in your
applications?

Are you experiencing a

high percentage of testing

defects that are caused by
bad test data?

Is privacy a key

consideration of your
application testing?

What is test data management?

Test data management (TDM) is the process of creating and working with a data set thats
representative of that used by enterprise applications. A TDM solution can save hours in
test data creation, build efficiency into your test process, ensure you avoid risk of exposed
sensitive data, and ultimately reduce costs associated with testing. A great use case of TDM
is Cognizant, a leading global provider of IT, consulting, and business process services.
Using a test data management solution, Cognizant reduced overall test data management
costs for one of its clients by 40%4 (see Cognizants experience on page 5).
An enterprise TDM solution should help you meet these core application-testing objectives:
Provision test data that models the existing production environment. Basic functional
and regression testing should include a representative set of production data that is
considered baseline. Without this capability, test results are not reliable.
Provision test data that models a hypothetical production system for purposes of new
development. If its a new application, the design team needs to provide the testing team
with the definition of a typical test data set to be used as the baseline. This capability will
save testers hundreds of hours from manually creating hypothetical test data.
Test Data must not expose the risk of violating privacy laws. The challenge here is
that obfuscated data must still be usable or you risk introducing errors. Testers must be
concerned about privacy because legislation has worldwide coveragefrom each US
State (such as CA SB 1386), to industry laws (HIPAA, GLB), to regional laws (European
Data Protection Directive). Your organization must de-identify sensitive data that is shared
with third parties or outside borders and use reasonable practices (such as masking) for
internal use.
Test data should be variable enough to allow what-if testing. Extreme-conditions (aka
negative) testing ensures that if something doesnt go as planned, the application
responds correctly. This is the only way to test how the application handles errors. Not
only should the data be variable, but the definitions need to catalogued and reusable
for control purposes.
Support many projects simultaneously with limited database administrator resources.
Manually provisioning test data consumes significant database admin cycles and
introduces inconsistent results. Automating test data generation eliminates bottlenecks and
frees up administrators to focus on other priorities.
Create smaller but representative data sets. This speeds the testing process and optimizes
the testing teams time. Infrastructure costs can escalate when unencumbered server and
database cloning is part of the testing culture.
Allow testers to provision test data in a self-service model. It is common to have multiple
testers share a single test environment. Whether test data is sourced from larger test data
sources or synthetically generated, testers require the ability to reset test data at
an individual or functional level to avoid interfering with or overwriting each others
data sets.
Cognizant Improves Tester Productivity and Reduces Customer Application Testing Time by 20 Percent
with Informatica: http://www.informatica.com/Images/02472_cognizant-improves-tester-productivity_
cs_en-US.pdf

Cognizants experience
No matter your industry, most enterprise IT groups face the same business challenges:
Increase efficiency, reduce costs, and mitigate risk. When it came to generating application
test data, Cognizant needed to solve all three challenges. As one of the worlds largest
quality assurance and engineering outsourcers with more than 4,000 testers across the
globe, Cognizant needed to deliver testing services more efficiently while ensuring testers
were not exposed to sensitive data.
Heres the background: Cognizant created testing Centers of Excellence for priority
customersthese centers control the entire application testing function within a customer
organization and range from 300 to 500 Cognizant resources deployed at the customer
site. They were using an internally developed test data management solution to deliver the
Cognizant Testing Services (CTS). As their business expanded, however, their test data
management solution restricted their ability to scale in line with customers data growth.
The custom tool introduced challenges to cope with the wide variety of data, including
packaged applications such as SAP, Siebel, or other cloud sources. Cognizant needed to
find an alternative test data management solution to maintain competitiveness.

We are shrinking
customers development
cycles by working with
smaller sets of test data, and
lowering IT costs through
the use of smaller data sets
that require less storage and
fewer system resources.
Pradeepkumar Govindasamy,
Director, Cognizant Testing
Services

It ended up choosing and deploying Informaticas Test Data Management solution, and,
along with its domain expertise and testing experience, Cognizant was able to deliver great
results. For instance, it helped a U.S. retailer lower its test data provisioning time by more
than 95 percent and achieve a 33 percent reduction in overall test cycle time. The solution
also reduced test data provisioning time by 80 percent and test data size 60 percent for an
employee benefits management application project.

Why You Need Test Data Management

Why Informatica?
Informatica Test Data Management enables your IT organization to create functionally intact, secure test
data subsets of database applications from a single platform. With Informatica Test Data Management,
your organization can:
Reduce the number of testing tools by leveraging a common TDM platform across disparate, heterogeneous
applications to provision integrated test data sets.
Speed deployments using automated metadata discovery, test data profiling, and packaged application
accelerators for SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Salesforce.comto name a few.
Reuse the same test data definitions across on-premises and cloud-based applications.
Integrate sensitive data discovery, data masking, and data privacy validation to ensure compliance with
local and international regulations.
Leverage Informatica skillsets for existing Informatica customers.
Have confidence that you are using market leading technologyGartner positioned Informatica as a leader
in its 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Masking Technology5.
To learn more about how Informatica Test Data Management can help minimize application development
and testing costs, read more here: http://www.informatica.com/us/solutions/application-informationlifecycle-management/test-data-management/.

2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Masking Technology: http://www.informatica.com/magic-quadrant-datamasking/

About Informatica
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Why You Need Test Data Management

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