As software continues to revolutionize businesses around the globe, and privacy legislation becomes increasingly more stringent, there’s a critical demand for reliable, compliant, ultra-fast data for testing.
“Whether you’re making a change to an existing application or investigating whether a new application will work, it’s essential to have the right test data,” says Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, Data Management Software Research for International Data Corporation (IDC). “This involves replacing data that might expose confidential, personal identifying, or other sensitive information with fake data that still matches the format of the original, and is varied enough to yield a proper test.”
According to Olofson, there’s no manual way to create and maintain the large quantities of data needed for the rigorous testing of evolving applications. The answer, he says, is an automated solution that combines data subsets, masking, and on-demand data generation to deliver the right test data for the right use cases at the right stage of testing.
Olofson points out that all applications must be tested, yet accessing and managing test data remains a significant obstacle to developing high quality software. Automating the process reduces the time to provision test data, eliminates ambiguous requirements, and delivers the data sooner and more efficiently.
There’s a cost to developing a scalable, comprehensive solution, but there’s a greater cost to testing bottlenecks, long wait times, flawed data and poor quality software. Faced with expensive project delays, challenges of security, and privacy concerns, organizations are turning to a structured approach to test data management (TDM) at the enterprise level. The timing is right, according to a November 2015 forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC ). With IDC’s prediction that the big data submarket for software will grow over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.2%, test data has never been more important.
For more about test data management (TDM) Join ITWC CIO Jim Love on Tuesday, May 17, 2016 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm ET for a webinar called, The Real Secret to Quality Application Development. Jim and special guest, Huw Price VP, Continuous Delivery BU, CA Technologies, will explore how to get the right data for the right systems, how to keep it synchronized, and how to keep it safe — all without breaking the bank.
