Accelerate Testing & Release Cycles with Centralized TDM

By deploying a TDM solution, SLK software reduced test data provisioning time from 4 days to just 6 hours.

Case Summary

A prominent insurance company, specializing in property and casualty coverage, serves a diverse range of clients including both retail and commercial sectors. Owing to outdated legacy test data management (TDM) procedures and a lack of consistent optimization, the provisioning of data previously required four to five days, posing a significant risk of non-compliance. By introducing a comprehensive end-to-end TDM process and framework, SLK contributed to a reduction of nearly 80% in test data provisioning time.

The Challenge

The magnitude and intricacy of enterprise technology systems are rapidly increasing. Modern developers rely on substantial amounts of test data to ensure swift and flawless application releases. Without this, enterprises face the possibility of launching faulty software that could disrupt crucial operations and trigger a chain of failures within a business unit. The Insurance firm was encountering the following challenges:

  • Lack of a comprehensive end-to-end TDM framework affecting the introduction and updates of new application features
  • Outdated testing methods, provisioning protocols, and manual processes causing significant data provisioning delays
  • Project teams stretched thin due to tasks related to data acquisition and delivery
  • Inadequate data masking in non-production environments posing a high risk of compliance breaches.

Client’s Requirements:

  • Seeking a specialized solution provider to establish a comprehensive end-to-end TDM framework
  • Transition to an agile delivery model with accelerated development cycles and stringent testing requirements
  • Urgent implementation of TDM solution to support quicker processes
  • Automation of test data provisioning to relieve project team workloads
  • Ensuring data security, privacy compliance, and elimination of data breach risks

The Solution

We initiated a four-stage delivery approach. First, we assessed the client’s usage scenarios and application landscape for understanding of their data-related challenges. Then, we constructed POC using the chosen tools, and set up the necessary infrastructure, databases, and networks to effectively implement the TDM solution across application clusters. The subsequent phase involved abstracting and virtualizing the data sources to reduce their storage demands. Concurrently, we refined legacy PII parameters and introduced a masked version of their virtualized central dataset into the pre-production environment.

In order to empower the development and IQE teams to independently manage data refresh cycles within their production environments, we established a self-service portal along with an expedited protocol for adjusting data refresh frequency and conducting clean-up activities. We then demonstrated and deployed the TDM applications across multiple clusters in a systematic manner, commencing the synthetic test data generation process.

Business Impact

80%

Reduction in test data provisioning time

60%

Storage footprint reduction

5 Min%

Time taken to reset test data sets

SLK’s End-to-End TDM Implementation Delivered on Multiple Fronts:

A centralized TDM system helped them reduce data ingestion time to 90 minutes, data profiling to five minutes, data masking to four hours, and data provisioning across channels to 10 minutes. From start to finish, a total data refresh can be executed by the firm in only 6 hours, as opposed to 4-5 days. Overall, the time for test data provisioning was reduced by almost 80%.

  • SLK delivered a 60% reduction in the database storage footprint. Earlier, this data needed 6TB of storage and now with virtualization, it consumes less than 1TB of space
  • The self-service portal also ensures a shorter wait time, and reduces dependency on SMEs, while enabling more agile workflows
  • And finally, they can reset their test data sets in a matter of five minutes as compared to a few days earlier.
    This meant that they could reuse the same data for testing rigorously multiple times

The implementation of a centralized TDM system and automated data provisioning led to accelerated and precise testing, resulting in an increase in software release cycles. Simultaneously, the widespread application of PII obfuscation ensured the consistent adherence to data security standards, instilling confidence in the insurance firm’s capacity to avoid costly data breaches.