1. Test Data
Management
Concepts
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Executive Summary
We are witnessing a rapid growth of ICT systems, and
thus a significant increase in the volume of data in
organizations around the world. This trend causes the
need to increase ICT systems quality control, especially
regarding the management of test data. Additionally, we
must not ignore the responsibility of the organizations in
terms of data protection and data privacy.
The only way to ensure the quality of ICT systems is through high awareness
of Quality Assurance (QA) and application of QA and, in particular, the software
testing process, during the entire lifecycle of the applications. One of the most
important disciplines within the testing process is Test Data Management (TDM).
TDM introduces a number of new concepts in the testing process (for example,
the concept of near-real data, see below) to which each professional TDM tool
must have a response. Working for years on complex projects for international
clients, we have noticed the importance of high-quality implementation of the
key concepts of TDM and decided to build a solution that would help both our
customers and us. The result is BizDataX, an innovative solution for test data
management.
BizDataX enables just in time provisioning of near real relevant test data, assures
compliancy to data privacy standards and provides seamless integration with
common test management and test automation tools. BizDataX fits seamlessly
into the testing process and provides you with a personalized and efficient
generation of test data with minimal costs.

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Introduction
Test Data Management (TDM) is an integral part of the
testing process, supporting the process in all of its phases,
enabling fast provisioning of the test data at the lowest
possible cost while staying compliant to industry and
public data privacy regulations. TDM is a foundation for
test automation, thus increasing test process efficiency,
minimizing risks and increasing the overall quality of the
application and systems being tested.
Here are the key concepts of a well thought-out test data management solution:
• Near real data
• Data regulation compliancy
• Fast test data provisioning
• Powerful and flexible test data rules designer
• Support for key test data generation concepts, such as data masking, data
subsetting and synthetic data generation
• Support for a variety of source and target data repositories
• Support for data analysis
• Test data project configuration management
• Support for third party test management and test automation tools
• Enterprise features (scalability, role based security..)
• Documenting and archiving capabilities
This document’s goal is to help you get a better understanding of each of these
key concepts and to provide you with information on how the BizDataX Test Data
Management solution implements these concepts.

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Near real data
The concept of near real or realistic enough data relies on
the fact that test data should resemble, in terms of data
quality and semantics, as much as possible the data in the
production databases (or the data that is expected to be
used in real world scenarios). This is a key concept in a test
process, assuring the correlation between the controlled
test environment and the real world scenarios.
BizDataX employs many data generation and data masking techniques and
algorithms that enable generation of the near real data. Some of them are lists
of replacement values, national identification number generators, generators of
financial values, generators of phone numbers, emails and many others.
BIZDATAX WORKFLOW EXAMPLE

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Data regulations compliancy
Using production data to generate test data is a common
and often preferred method of test data provisioning.
Along with many positive aspects of doing this, there are
privacy and business concerns that need to be taken into
account. A TDM solution must be supplied with techniques
that enable flexible data masking on sensitive data in
order to comply with the various data protection laws.
When using algorithms to generate near real data, BizDataX already takes data
privacy into account. For example, when generating credit card numbers, BizDataX
generates them from a range of invalid credit card numbers that satisfy all format
requirements, but are not issued to real persons worldwide. BizDataX already
comes with a number of prepackaged algorithms and methods, such as data
shuffling, but also uses the .NET development platform to create any number of
new, privacy-aware test data generation methods.
BIZDATAX WORKFLOW – GENERATE CREDIT CARD INFO

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Fast test data provisioning
Depending on the business scenarios, test data could be needed
on a daily, even hourly basis. In a complex business applications
environment, a demand for the ‘just-in-time’ relevant test data
will be very high. This can incur significant costs for hardware and
trained resources who will be responsible for providing test data to
testing teams.
BizDataX is designed from the ground up to enable fast test data generation workflow design,
deployment and execution. You can create complex test data scenarios using BizDataX
Designer, deploy them in BizDataX Runtime and generate billions of test data records, all
within hours. Once created, test data generation jobs can be executed an arbitrary number of
times. Special care is taken to speed up the jobs execution. BizDataX Runtime engine analyzes
declarative rules to determine the optimal execution plan, generate statements, and achieve
the best possible performance with parallel execution and paging of large record sets.
BIZDATAX DESIGNER AND RUNTIME
Designer
Runtime
Management
Console
Host
Host
Host
Test
Databases
Flat file
XML

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Powerful and flexible test data
rules designer
Every TDM solution needs to have an intuitive and efficient way to design rules for test data
generation. This is where most solutions today fail. In order to cover all the real world scenarios,
your rules design engine can’t be bound to just a number of predefined rules for a specific
industry or use only scripting languages or even worse (education costs) own proprietary
language as an extensibility point. Both user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) also play a
very important role when choosing the right solution.
BizDataX Designer integrates with the Microsoft Visual Studio environment and Workflow
Editor. Wizards and visual clues support the process of defining the rules. Drag-n-drop helps
set up the common parameters, the properties window is there to help tweak the details. The
rules are designed visually using domain-specific terminology. One doesn’t have to think about
tables, views, raw SQL, loops, cursors, transactions and such. BizDataX naturally extends to the
.NET platform offering full support for programming languages such as C#, JScript etc.
By leveraging Microsoft’s world class development platform, BizDataX speeds up test data
generation workflow
development,
shortens the education
curve and cuts the
overall cost of test
data management.
BIZDATAX DESIGNER

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Support for key test data
generation concepts like data
masking, data subsetting and
synthetic data generation
BizDataX enables provisioning of test data by combining feature-rich data
masking, data subsetting and synthetic data generation capabilities. When
masking real data, generating from scratch
or combining the two, the system uses
built-in:
• Lists of replacement values: person names
with country/region and gender attributes,
places, postal codes, streets, banks…
• National identification number generators
(SSN, AHV, OIB…)
• Generators of financial values: credit card
numbers, account numbers, IBANs
• Generators of phone numbers, emails…
• Data shuffling engine
• Templates with placeholders used to
populate free text fields
• Formulas to shift dates
• Conditional constructs to handle special
cases
• Distributions to generate data with certain
statistical properties
• and more..
Many day-to-day testing processes
are able to function and benefit from
using a very small subsets of originally
huge sets of records. Smaller databases
lower the investment in hardware and
software licenses needed to build a parallel
infrastructure.
Masked data
Real data

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Support for a variety of source
and target data repositories
In many TDM scenarios, access to production data is
needed to generate test data. Production data is typically
stored in many different data storage systems, and
accessing data across them with some
sort of home-grown, script-based
approach could be very challenging.
Support for different data repositories
is a must for a good TDM solution.
BizDataX can connect to a wide variety of data sources,
including relational and legacy databases. It can
also connect to flat files, Excel files, MS SQL Analysis
Services projects and XML. Directly connecting to
different data storage systems is supplemented by the
option to transfer data to an intermediate database to
separate the core test data generation process from
ETL.
The resulting test database can be created in a variety
of database formats. Additionally, BizDataX preserves
referential data integrity across database and system
boundaries.
BIZDATAX WORKFLOW EXAMPLE WITH ACCESS TO
ORACLE, DB2 AND SQL SERVER DATABASES

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Support for data analysis
A TDM solution has to have the capability to analyze production
data in order to accurately define test data generation rules
according to the business rules. A thorough data analysis is the
foundation for successful and efficient test process. It enables
identifying relevant data needed to complete test cases, thus
saving time and increasing the quality of the process. It also helps
optimize test data volumes for easier database management and
lower hardware costs.
BizDataX can connect to a wide variety of data sources, importing their schemas and enabling
production metadata analysis. BizDataX also enables definition of criteria for identifying and
grouping equivalent records and support equivalence partitioning. Data record groups can
be analyzed to identify
special cases and achieve
100% test case coverage.
The criteria is then
used by the sampling
and subsetting engine
to extract the minimal
relevant subset of original
data or by generators to
generate synthetic data
that targets specific test
scenarios.
SUPPORTING
EQUIVALENCE
PARTITIONING

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Test data project
configuration management
As the application and the underlying database change,
the test data (generation) rules also need to be upgraded
from time to time. A good TDM solution should enable
test data rules versioning in order to support application
upgrades, transparency and reusability, especially when
it comes to testing older versions of the same application
(which, of course, happens a lot).
BizDataX integrates into
the software development
lifecycle. With BizDataX,
you’ll be able to check-
in changes to test data
projects, just as you would be
able to check-in any changes
on the application’s source
code; test data rules would
always be up to date and
changes would be tracked in
your source control system.
Versioning of test data
rules works with standard
technologies such as the
Microsoft Team Foundation
Server, Git, Subversion and
many other source code
management solutions.
TEST DATA PROJECT TREE AND TEST DATA JOB
EXECUTION HISTORY

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Data labeled
for test cases
Other TM/TA
tools
Test data
Support for third party
test management and test
automation tools
Organizations report that they spend between 50-75 out
of every 100 minutes of manual test execution time on
finding and preparing appropriate test data. Yet they are
still unable to achieve stable test automation due to a lack
of reliable test data control. Test Management and Test
Automation solutions can greatly benefit from integration
with TDM solutions as they, used efficiently together,
could significantly increase the testing execution times.
In addition to generating test data, BizDataX can be configured to label data for
test cases and provide data for test automation tools, such as Microsoft Test
Manager, HP Unified Functional Testing, Tricentis Tosca, imbus Test Bench etc.
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Enterprise features (scalability,
role based security...)
Processing TBs of data in an enterprise environment requires
support for features, such as the role-based security model, ability
to scale test data generation jobs on several hosts, job execution
status protocol, to name a few. These features come at a price and
are not there by default on every TDM solution on the market.
As already mentioned in the ‘Fast test data provisioning’ section, BizDataX Runtime is an
enterprise level application that supports role-based security and other enterprise features and
fits perfectly within a complex IT landscape.
BizDataX Runtime can be installed on a single or on multiple systems, virtualized or real, and
managed centrally with industry standard tools, such as Microsoft Management Console.
BIZDATAX RUNTIME

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Documenting, protocolling and
archiving capabilities
In order to comply with data privacy regulations and corporate policies, a TDM solution must
support documenting of all steps within a test data project. This documentation should enable
external and internal audits to easily validate rules and workflows used to generate test data.
Moreover, a TDM solution should protocol all test data generation jobs executions to support
transparency and traceability within the test
process. Once the test data project is over, it
should be archived and eventually restored
to support generating historical test data.
BizDataX supports documenting each and
every step within the BizDataX Test Data
Project in a visual manner. Complete rule
sets can be exported or printed out when
a hard copy version of documentation is
requested. Every time a test data generation
job executes on a BizDataX Runtime, a
status log is created with all the relevant
log information, including who started the
execution and when. BizDataX uses a variety
of software configuration management
tools, such as the Team Foundation Server
and Git to version, archive and
restore any number of BizDataX
Test Data Projects in order to
recreate historical test data. The
test data generated and labeled
for the test cases by BizDataX
is saved in XML format, which
can be transformed and used
for documentation purposes or
imported to test management/
automation tools.
BIZDATAX DOCUMENTING OPTIONS

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BizDataX Professional Services
It is the people and the tools that make the difference!
Our Professional Services Team will help you get the most out of the test data
management process and the BizDataX solution. They will help you set up your
test data environment and assess your test data according to your needs, adapt
BizDataX to fit in your test data usage scenarios and implement new test data
algorithms for your specific requirements (e.g. industry specific data masking
rules). They will also educate your test professionals how to design, deploy and
execute BizDataX test data generation jobs on their own.
Professional services portfolio includes:
Test Data
Assesment
Custom Workflow
and Algorithms
Implementation
Proof of
Concept
BizDataX Solution
Installation
BizDataX
Workshops

16. BIZDATAX IS AN EKOBIT BRAND
• deliver near real test data just in
time
• comply to data privacy regulations
• support implementation of all test
data scenarios using visual design
tools
• integrate seamlessly with
common test management and
test automation tools
• increase test process efficiency
while lowering costs
BizDataX is an innovative Test Data Management solution designed to enable fast
and cost effective provisioning of near-real test data. BizDataX promise is to:
Call Us:
+41 76 579 16 41
+385 1 6312 635
Email: info@bizdatax.com
www.BizDataX.com
Ekobit d.o.o.
Koturaška 69
10000 Zagreb, Croatia, EU
www.ekobit.com
BizDataX Sales partner DACH region
aminodata GmbH
Gartenstrasse 23
5400 Baden, Switzerland
www.aminodata.com