Broadcom Test Data Manager Reviews

Synthetic Data Creation with use of flexible built in data functions.

We have moved data creation from manual or limited and costly automated processes to a set of weekly data builds and an On-Demand offering capable of delivering versatile data that meets the needs of our many teams.

An increase in the types of programmatic capabilities could allow the tool to be more powerful. For instance, often data inserts in one table are contingent upon entries or flags from another. In these situations, there is no way to choose to include/exclude a row based on the primary table.

2.5 years

The tool installs in a snap and includes test repositories that allow for new users to start working with the application immediately.

The stability of the tool has never been an issue. Any time a possible defect has surfaced, the support team was quick to respond. Beyond that, there have been constant new versions created that provide optimizations.

The many databases supported and data delivery formats available provide a seemingly endless supply of options to meet the ever growing demand of our testing teams.

Above and beyond that of any company that I’ve worked with before. I’ve never been more than an hour or two without a response to a standard ticket creation.

Also above the standard. Those that support TDM have an intimate knowledge with the product and it’s many available use cases.

All previous solutions were homegrown and they missed the complete solution we found in CA’s TDM.

Our process had ups and downs as we tempted to get TDM off the ground. The winning combination for us was TDM experts from a vendor-partner, Orasi Software, Inc. working hand in hand with employees that had an intimate knowledge with our systems.

This tool had been purchased by another group in our company but it’s potential was not realized.

Our biggest wins in implementing this tool was to start out by working with a singular team and find some data delivery wins. After that internal proof of concept was realized, expansion to other teams became much more simple.

There are a lot of great features with Test Data Manager. It's allowed us to really revolutionize the way that we are doing our testing. We use Test Data Manager to create synthetic data for our testing purposes. We have a legacy application that has been around for a very long time, and a lot of the people that originally developed it are no longer with the company, so we've had to do a lot what we call, "Data Archaeology," to go in and recreate our data model. Test Data Manager has allowed us to do that, capture that model, and then create that data on demand, saving us a huge amount of time and money in the process.

It's really allowed us to focus on the craft of testing, and not focus on the creating data, spending time setting up the scenario that we need, or trying to find that sort of thing. It's allowed us to be more focused on our efforts, it's allowed us to be faster. We run an agile shop, and so we've been able to use that data in our pipeline as we deliver stuff in a CICD world. It's been great.

It's been very stable. We haven't had any issues with the technology at all.

It has scaled for us very well. We're able to do small amounts of data and large amounts for performance testing.

It's been great. They're very knowledgeable in the tool, they've helped us overcome some hurdles as we've been evolving in the practice ourselves and they've been super.

Test data creation, for us, was a very manual process. The options were either creating it with hands-on keyboards with people actually having to spend time creating it, and we would also do some things where we would just grab data out of production. That didn't always work for us, because you didn't know what you were going to get when you captured that data.

Not being able to create your own data was very time consuming to create data on your own. Or, when you did things like grab things out of production. You didn't always get all the data combinations that you might need, it just happened to be whatever was there at the time. You certainly weren't getting some of the negative scenarios that we need to test with also.

CA and one of our vendor partners came in and helped us do a Proof of Concept. They helped set up the infrastructure, and then walked us through the application, and actually proved out that we could do in in our environment, because it was, for us, an interesting environment. It was, I wouldn't say easy, but we were able to get it done.

The return on investment for us has been great. In the last year, we captured some metrics around our ROI, and we've saved over eleven thousand hours in manual time of trying to create test data. In that same time, that eleven thousand hours, has translated to about eleven million dollars in cost savings, just from that. Additional benefits around being able to shorten our test cycle time, allow us to go deeper and further into our testing and freeing up people to actually do the work that they're paid to do, and not being doing things like creating data so that they can actually do the work.

It was a green field for us. We just really didn't know what, where, so we looked at everything that was available in the space, and we chose CA because they probably did have the best offering that would support the most technologies. We have everything from legacy, RPG iSeries type stuff, all the way up to applications in the cloud, and we needed something that would scale for all of those.

Important criteria when selecting a vendor: we want to work with somebody that's going to help us solve the problem that we're trying to solve. Do it in a way that works for our enterprise. We don't want to do something that only works for one team or one solution, something that's scalable. We have a lot of different technologies in our organization, so we need something that will work with all of them.

We need a partner that will help us. This was something new to us, and so we needed somebody to help us dive in, figure out how to do it in our world, and translate that out and help us be successful with the implementation.

Rating: I would say it is a 10/10. It's been a great experience for us. We really have benefited a lot from it. It's been a great story, as we've learned how to sell it and embed it into our process, and it's been really beneficial for us. We got a lot of conversations with people while we've been here about recommending the application. It's been transformative for us in order to implement that.

It's an interesting process to go through. Organizations need to change their model and stop thinking about how they've always done things, and so the challenge is really getting people to think in a new way, but once they do, it's been a terrific experience. It's really allowed us to focus on the craft of what we're trying to do, rather than lots of other activities that we don't need to be spending time on.

You've got the basic services of the TDM tool which allows you to mask data, it allows you to create synthetic data, but I think what really sets TDM apart from the other competitors, is the kind of the added extras that you get with doing true test data management, so you've got things like the cubing concepts that are grid tools, or data maker, kind of really brings to bear within test data management teams. You've also got test matching as well which massively accelerates test cycles and really gives stability and allows automation to happen.

We've got a centralized COE in terms of test data management within our organization, benefits that are really three fold in terms of cost, quality and time to market. In terms of the quality we through test data management where, data is kind of the glue that holds systems together and therefore, if I understand my test data, I understand what I'm testing. Through the tooling and kind of the maturity in the tooling we're really bringing an added quality aspect in terms of what we test and how we test, and the risk based testing that we might approach.

In terms of the speed to market, because we don't manually produce data anymore, we use intelligent profiling techniques, test data matching, we massively reduce the time we spend finding data, and we also can produce data on the fly, which turns around test data cycles. In terms of cost, because we're doing it a lot quicker, it's a lot cheaper.

We have a centralized test data management team that caters for all development within my organization. We've created an organization that is so much more effective and optimized in terms of the kind of the time to get to test execution, to identify data and get into execution in the right way.

I think the kind of the big area for exploitation for us is already a feature that already exists within the tool. The TCO element is something massive, I talked earlier on about the kind of the maturity and the structure that it gives you to testing. I think this is kind of a game changer in terms of articulating impact of change and no project goes swimmingly first time and therefore the ability to impact a test through kind of a making simple process changes is a massive benefit.

The stability of the solution is really fine. I think the really big question is the stability of underlying system that it's trying to manipulate and the tool is the tool, it does what it needs to do.

Within our organization we have many, many platforms, many, many different technologies. One of the interesting challenges we always have is in terms of, especially when we're doing performance testing, can we get the kind of the volumes of data in sufficient times, and we use things like data explosion quite often and it does what it needs to do and it does it very quickly.

We work in an organization where we use many tools from many different suppliers. I think that the kind of a relationship that my organization has with CA is kind of a much richer one in terms of, you know, it's not just a tool support.

Originally we used to spend probably, hours and hours and hours of spreadsheet time manually creating, keying data, massively inefficient, massively error prone, and clearly as part of a financial institution we need to conform to regulations. Therefore we needed an enterprise solution to make sure that we could actually deliver a regulatory data, test data, to suit our projects.

The initial driver with kind of really buying any tooling initially is kind of what's the problem statement, what's the driver to get these things in? I think once you realize that there is so much more than just the regulatory bit, as I say, the time, cost, quality aspect that it can actually give to test, that's really the kind of the bigger benefit than just regulatory.

We've had the tool for about four or five years now within the organization. As you might expect we first got the guys in not knowing anything about the tool and not really knowing how to deploy it, therefore what we needed to do was we called on the CA guys to come in and really to show us how the tool works, but also how to manipulate that within our organization. We had a problem case that we wanted to address, we used that as the proving item, and that's really where we started our journey in terms of a dedicated test data management function.

Important evaluation criteria: to be honest it's got to be around what does the tool do? A lot of the tools on the market do the same thing, whether there are things that differentiate those tools, and what's really the organization's problem statement they're trying to fulfill. Once you've got the tool, that's great, but you need the people and process, and without that, it comes back to the relationship that you have with the CA guys, you've just got to shelfwear and a tool. We went through a proper RFP selection process where we kind of set our criteria and we kind of we invited a few of the kind of the vendors into come and demonstrate what they could do for us and picked the one that was best suited to us.

Rating: no one's perfect. You got to go in the top quartile of it, so you're probably eight upwards. I think in terms of test data management solutions, it's the best out there. I think that the way that tool is going it's kind of moving into other areas in TCO and kind of the integration with SV, it's a massive thing for us.

I think the recommendation is that absolutely this is kind of the best in breed. As well as buying the tool, it would be a mistake to not also invest in kind of understanding how the tool integrates into the organization and kind of how to bring that into the kind of the tools team, the testing teams and the environment teams that you need to work with.