Test data management

Pseudonymised test data? GDPR or MNB compliance? No problem!

The accelerated pace of everyday life in the 21st century and the digitalization and telecommuting efforts that are gaining momentum as a result of the COVID pandemic all require more and more software code that can be produced faster and faster. The time required to produce software and implement new systems can be a concrete competitive advantage or disadvantage, not to mention the competitive situations in the online space, where a software application failure can mean immediate loss of customers – with competitors just “a click away” waiting with open arms. No wonder, the shortening of the software implementation lifecycle and the production and deployment of proven bug-free applications today has highlighted the critical importance of software testing.

The ‘industrial’ production and deployment of software has also brought about a number of methodological and technological changes in the field of software testing. Today’s CI/CD processes encompass the sub-activities of operational software delivery and focus on testing activities, for which test management provides an organizational, technological and methodological framework. The design, organization, provision, execution, evaluation and feedback of different types of tests (regression, integration, performance, etc.) are the day-to-day tasks of test management. Providing the various test cases with the appropriate test data has become a complex task.

Why is it challenging to provide the right test data? Creating test data, especially in bulk, would be a time-consuming manual task, so it is common practice to use copies of databases from production systems. Problems with this practice are compliance with data protection (GDPR, MNB etc.) rules and the potential huge live database record count. Other challenges include serving test robots with real-world data, managing huge test databases that swell due to test data “stale” during tests, test data reusability and serving different test environments with the same prepared test data. The test data management solution from Barré Technologies Zrt. offers answers to all these challenges and a practical solution.

Our test data management solution is based on IBM’s automated data discovery, data classification, data inventory and IBM OPTIM test data management solutions. With the help of Barré Test Data Management, a GDPR-compliant anonymized so-called Gold Copy is created by extracting the data from the live databases, which Barré Test Data Management uses in everyday work to serve a number of different test types as follows:

• Gold Copy depersonalization and anonymization on demand without compromising the integrity between different application databases.
• Serving test robots with anonymized test data from production systems, via REST API calls.
• Test data pre-processing and metadata management to quickly and automatically serve specific test data needs.
• Test data lifecycle tracking with record-level inventory for reusability,
• Automated, bulk and managed test data loading into any number of test environments running in parallel.
• Provide test data for automated test environment creation without human intervention.

Our team takes the development of test data management systems from design to follow-up support. We also offer original IBM trainings for our systems. We have several project references are mainly in the financial area, large banking systems and large public companies.