July 18th, 2018 by Adam Sandman
Would you like to have a realistic, full production-like data set available in your test management suite? Having all the exceptions, pollution and human or system made data entry errors available before an application or release goes life is a major quality assurance advantage. Just read the news and learn about some of the recent IT failures due to data migration or testing without a realistic set of sample data.
Imagine the reduction of the amount of rework when you have a professional test data solution directly available in SpiraTest and in your test and acceptance environments. Moreover, adding realistic automated test data to Rapise would rapidly increase the value & quality of your data-driven automated regression testing.
Why Are We Asking?
DATPROF is the Dutch market leader in test data management solutions and has been solving two issues for their clients. Firstly, under the recent GDPR privacy regulations in Europe it is no longer allowed to copy production databases for test purposes (under US HIPAA rules the same is true for those in the life sciences). Another challenge is the size (often terabytes) and duration of a copy: the test and acceptance environment are often too large and outdated.
This is precisely where the combined Inflectra and DATPROF solutions work together and add value to each other! We are right now in a partner conversation with DATPROF and believe there is tremendous value for our customers in having DATPROF integrated with SpiraTest and Rapise.
However, we want to hear from you, our customers before we embark on this effort to make sure you agree that it makes sense, and would be useful to you. So please let us know by emailing sales@inflectra.com, using the Contact-Us Form on our website, or my replying to one of our social channels.
What is the DATPROF Solution?
Their test data management suite has 3 mayor components with DATPROF Runtime being the heart of the solution. This central dashboard controls all the test data sources and integrations. This environment is filled with anonymizing, subsetting and integration templates. Below you see a typical example of how these component work together: the production refresh is masked in a secure environment and the distributed to the non-production environments.
The DATPROF Runtime is where Scrum team members access the test data set in a self-service manner and where the privacy officers have access to the GDPR / HIPAA compliant audit reports. If you are a test automation expert, you have access to the integration apps and can realize your own automation with the DATPROF API. To be short: administrators have all the tools for easy maintenance available and management has full control over the entire landscape.
The template-based solution DATPROF Privacy helps you to be compliant by anonymizing and sanitizing copies of production databases making them compliant to the European privacy law (GDPR) as well as US Healthcare rules (HIPAA). You have access to a variety of masking options such as shuffling, scrambling and value lookups. With the custom expression library, you can apply just about any masking technique thinkable.
The template solution DATPROF Subset not only brings speed to the distribution of test data and allows you to refresh your test data on-demand, but also reduces the risk of accidental privacy disclosures or personal data breaches. With just a few percent of the data you can cover all of the test cases while realizing mayor savings on storage costs.
What Should You Do?
Do you share our enthusiasm? Do you think we should go ahead and realize this integration?
If we were to prioritize an integration, which one would be first? Would you integrate DATPROF into (or on top of) SpiraTest or would you rather see the direct Rapise integration first?
Please let us know so we can honor you as an early adapter and move your test maturity to the next level.
Michael de Boer is partner manager at DATPROF and can be reached at michael@datprof.com