A Formidable Challenge
The basic life skills of an optimal tool for test data provision still entail in copying, in various ways. Speed and efficiency have priority as long as mass data is involved, refresh of pre-prod environments, integration test environments, often also unit test environments require moving GBs if not TBs of data. It does make a difference whether it takes one hour or ten hours to copy a terabyte of data, not to mention the resource consumption associated with a ten-hour copy. Of course, copy rates do not have first priority to application developers, already a few records, mostly spread over a number of tables, may form a specific test case. Developers ask for flexibility and ease of use to select, collect and modify data, for support regarding dependencies, for support to follow constraints, for clear breakdown of relationships, simple ways to define, apply and administer modification functions, etc. Management should keep a wary eye on data privacy and data protection. It should not be at the programmer’s discretion whether sensitive fields are to be masked, masking is to constrain, for a number of reasons, not least because of legal regulations. Management has to specify what is to be masked (not an easy task), the copy procedure implements the regulation. Down the bottom line, demands on a test data management tool are manifold. However, an integrated solution that meets all requirements, that offers a uniform user interface simplifies deployment and helps to meet profitability requirements.