Test Data Automation vs Legacy Test Data Management Tooling
Curiosity believe that Test Data Automation offers a valuable and viable alternative to your legacy test data management (TDM) tooling. We also offer veteran test data experts to support your roll-out, with a team that have founded and worked together at multiple test data specialists since 1995.
Below, we summarise the frustrations that we hear from organisations seeking an alternative to their current test data tooling, providing side-by-side analysis of how we believe migrating to Test Data Automation can resolve them.
To learn more about migrating quickly to Test Data Automation, read our migration playbook for an example migration plan, comparison to legacy TDM tooling, and example ROI metrics.
If you’re ready to start your migration, please book a meeting with a Curiosity expert to start scoping and planning your move.
Product development, “future proofing” and test data R&D
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Concern with legacy TDM tooling
Organisations who still rely on legacy TDM tools risk being locked into technologies that are growing increasingly outdated relative to their needs. This is especially true if a vendor has de-funded development for TDM, for instance when offloading intellectual property (code) and personnel during an acquisition, or re-assigning teams to other products in a large portfolio.
Non-specialist vendors of TDM tools might market hundreds of products, some built-up via acquisitions. The TDM tools might only then be “future proofed” for as long as they are prioritized and viewed as strategically important to the company. Organisations with such tools should consider whether their TDM solutions have fallen down the priority list for development, and whether in future they will fall behind newer tools acquired by the vendor.
The challenge with slow or de-funded TDM tool development is that organization’s test data requirements evolve continuously. This includes the need to work with new data sources and integrations, as well as evolving delivery methodologies and increasing volumes of data. Fit-for-purpose test data solutions require proactive R&D with regards to each customer’s unique requirements. Bug fixes and security patches are not enough.
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The alternative with Test Data Automation
The Curiosity team bring a 25+ year history in developing innovative test data solutions and remain committed to driving the space forward. Our engineering team contains senior developers and product owners who worked together at Grid-Tools, a company that started creating test data tooling in 2004. Several of our team further worked together in the 1990s, at previous start-ups founded by our leadership team.
Curiosity remain committed to driving innovation in Test Data Automation. Our engineering team has grown year-on-year since our founding, and in 2022 we announced fresh funding to accelerate growth.
In Curiosity, you will furthermore be working with a specialist test data vendor, and not a company who has acquired test data technologies alongside many other tools. We will partner closely with you to meet your requirements, with an agile development team to implement continuous enhancements and updates.
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Concern with legacy TDM tooling
Organisations who still rely on legacy TDM tools risk being locked into technologies that are growing increasingly outdated relative to their needs. This is especially true if a vendor has de-funded development for TDM, for instance when offloading intellectual property (code) and personnel during an acquisition, or re-assigning teams to other products in a large portfolio.
Non-specialist vendors of TDM tools might market hundreds of products, some built-up via acquisitions. The TDM tools might only then be “future proofed” for as long as they are prioritized and viewed as strategically important to the company. Organisations with such tools should consider whether their TDM solutions have fallen down the priority list for development, and whether in future they will fall behind newer tools acquired by the vendor.
The challenge with slow or de-funded TDM tool development is that organization’s test data requirements evolve continuously. This includes the need to work with new data sources and integrations, as well as evolving delivery methodologies and increasing volumes of data. Fit-for-purpose test data solutions require proactive R&D with regards to each customer’s unique requirements. Bug fixes and security patches are not enough.
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The alternative with Test Data Automation
The Curiosity team bring a 25+ year history in developing innovative test data solutions and remain committed to driving the space forward. Our engineering team contains senior developers and product owners who worked together at Grid-Tools, a company that started creating test data tooling in 2004. Several of our team further worked together in the 1990s, at previous start-ups founded by our leadership team.
Curiosity remain committed to driving innovation in Test Data Automation. Our engineering team has grown year-on-year since our founding, and in 2022 we announced fresh funding to accelerate growth.
In Curiosity, you will furthermore be working with a specialist test data vendor, and not a company who has acquired test data technologies alongside many other tools. We will partner closely with you to meet your requirements, with an agile development team to implement continuous enhancements and updates.
Support, services and roll-out
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Concern with legacy TDM tooling
No two test data projects are the same, and effective test data roll-outs must be attentive to a range of your unique requirements. Test data transformation must further extend far beyond tooling, including changes in mindset and practice. This typically requires supportive and expert coaching, alongside the technical expertise needed to implement new tools.
Often lacking expert guidance, organisations risk incomplete roll-outs of legacy test data tooling. These organisations might have been assigned junior support engineers, or handed-off to local partners with varying levels of training. In some instances, services might even have been moth-balled early into a multi-year license deals, largely leaving organisations to manage their own implementations.
Some vendors have historically offloaded services personnel during an acquisition or signed exclusive services agreements with third parties. With hindsight, such agreements might feel to your organization like a statement of intent with regards to the TDM services that the vendor can provide.
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The alternative with Test Data Automation
In Curiosity, you will be partnering with veteran test data inventors, who will closely support your goals of a successful roll-out, high ROI, and short time-to-value.
Our team offers a rare combination of extensive project experience, cutting-edge software, and a proven history of innovation. We further bring an ethos of partnering closely with our customers, working collaboratively to solve your hardest problems in testing and development.
Curiosity additionally maintain a global network of trusted partners, who we will recommend for local services when it is the most beneficial to your roll-out.
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Concern with legacy TDM tooling
No two test data projects are the same, and effective test data roll-outs must be attentive to a range of your unique requirements. Test data transformation must further extend far beyond tooling, including changes in mindset and practice. This typically requires supportive and expert coaching, alongside the technical expertise needed to implement new tools.
Often lacking expert guidance, organisations risk incomplete roll-outs of legacy test data tooling. These organisations might have been assigned junior support engineers, or handed-off to local partners with varying levels of training. In some instances, services might even have been moth-balled early into a multi-year license deals, largely leaving organisations to manage their own implementations.
Some vendors have historically offloaded services personnel during an acquisition or signed exclusive services agreements with third parties. With hindsight, such agreements might feel to your organization like a statement of intent with regards to the TDM services that the vendor can provide.
-
The alternative with Test Data Automation
In Curiosity, you will be partnering with veteran test data inventors, who will closely support your goals of a successful roll-out, high ROI, and short time-to-value.
Our team offers a rare combination of extensive project experience, cutting-edge software, and a proven history of innovation. We further bring an ethos of partnering closely with our customers, working collaboratively to solve your hardest problems in testing and development.
Curiosity additionally maintain a global network of trusted partners, who we will recommend for local services when it is the most beneficial to your roll-out.
Licensing
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Concern with legacy TDM tooling
Legacy test data tooling might have been sold as part of multi-year deals, sometimes combining several tools from a vendor’s portfolio at a discount per tool.
As these agreements come to an end, organisations in turn risk costly renewals that include software they rarely use or need. Yet, moving off or reducing the scope of these deals could risk a twofold increase:
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First, organisations risk paying more per unit to license the pieces of software they want to retain.
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Second, the cost might be based on the increased usage achieved by a years-long roll-out since the initial agreement was made.
Organisations with licensing of this kind can in turn risk paying more for less software, or being forced into renewals that include software they might not want or use.
Customers who have licensed legacy TDM tooling standalone similarly appear to be facing costly renewals, based on the costs reported by users.
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The alternative with Test Data Automation
With Test Data Automation, you only pay for the tools you need, for the term that works best for you. The most common licensing model is componentised and based on an annual subscription. To further support sustainability and scalability, licensing additionally accounts for the number of named data engineers and concurrent data requestors.
Curiosity’s sales team openly discuss possible licensing models with prospective customers, and will work with you to find the best approach for your procurement needs. They will not try to lock you in or sell you software that you will not use.
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Concern with legacy TDM tooling
Legacy test data tooling might have been sold as part of multi-year deals, sometimes combining several tools from a vendor’s portfolio at a discount per tool.
As these agreements come to an end, organisations in turn risk costly renewals that include software they rarely use or need. Yet, moving off or reducing the scope of these deals could risk a twofold increase:
-
First, organisations risk paying more per unit to license the pieces of software they want to retain.
-
Second, the cost might be based on the increased usage achieved by a years-long roll-out since the initial agreement was made.
Organisations with licensing of this kind can in turn risk paying more for less software, or being forced into renewals that include software they might not want or use.
Customers who have licensed legacy TDM tooling standalone similarly appear to be facing costly renewals, based on the costs reported by users.
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The alternative with Test Data Automation
With Test Data Automation, you only pay for the tools you need, for the term that works best for you. The most common licensing model is componentised and based on an annual subscription. To further support sustainability and scalability, licensing additionally accounts for the number of named data engineers and concurrent data requestors.
Curiosity’s sales team openly discuss possible licensing models with prospective customers, and will work with you to find the best approach for your procurement needs. They will not try to lock you in or sell you software that you will not use.
Current functionality
By its nature, “legacy” tooling’s functionality can fall behind evolving user needs. Organisations seeking alternatives to legacy TDM tooling often express a set of common concerns. These all make sense in the context of defunded tools that are slipping further behind evolutions in technology and delivery methodologies.
Concern with legacy TDM tooling
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Support for different data types
Organisations with legacy TDM tooling risk being frustrated by increasingly-limited support for different data sources, particularly newer and emerging technologies like NoSQL databases.
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Performance and scalability
As the average volume of enterprise data grows, test data tools must be continuously fine-tuned for performance. Organisations with legacy tooling risk increasing delays and frustrating failures during resource-intensive TDM jobs. Some tools were first introduced to the TDM market decades ago, and organisations should consider how effectively and consistently their TDM tools have been modernized.
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Integration into test automation and CI/CD
An inability to easily interface with automation frameworks and CI/CD pipelines risks a barrier to their adoption for legacy TDM users. Building hooks and interfaces with automated technologies might be skill- and labour-intensive, with limited support for APIs. Organisations might therefore need to look to consultants to bend and extend the capabilities of legacy tools. Yet, where a vendor has offloaded or re-allocated services talent, these experts might be in short supply.
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Self-service data capabilities and agility
In “agile” environments with parallel teams and frameworks, test data jobs must be reusable on demand. Otherwise, organisations risk bottlenecks as an over-worked test data team is overwhelmed by ever-changing data requests.
This reusability of test data jobs and requests can present a challenge for legacy TDM users. Where self-service capabilities are available, provisioning jobs might be time-consuming to set up, and might be limited to reserving data in a particular environment. This renders supposedly-parallel teams dependent on test data engineers whenever they need data in different environments, risking bottlenecks.
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Test data utilities, integrations and vision
Creating and serving all the compliant data needed throughout development today typically requires a range of integrated utilities. These far exceed the techniques that were the norm when commercial TDM tools first emerged decades ago.
Organisations cannot typically rely on point solutions for masking and subsetting, while effective test data strategies today must furthermore serve data to manual requesters, automation frameworks, and CI/CD pipelines.
Creating fit-for-purpose test data cannot furthermore occur in isolation from other DevOps processes, including requirements engineering, test creation, environment provisioning and test automation.
Organisations should consider the extent to which a TDM vendor and their tools offer a complete and integrated vision for creating and allocating data, given that data is the lifeblood of software design, testing and development.
With Test Data Automation
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Support for different data types
Test Data Automation supports a wide range of databases, files, and message types, ranging from the legacy to the cutting-edge.
This extensibility is enabled by a flexible set of techniques for pulling and pushing data into different data types. Test Data Automation is underpinned by Curiosity’s purpose-built workflow engine, VIP, which provides a standardised methodology for building new connectors at speed. Its interfacing techniques include going via APIs, the command line, and CI/CD tooling, or via front-ends and files.
Combined with the Curiosity teams’ 25+ years’ experience in working with common and uncommon data sources, these flexible interfacing techniques ensure that Test Data Automation is fully extensible and future-proofed with regards to data types and technologies.
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Performance and scalability
Re-entering the test data market in 2017, Curiosity have leveraged modern technologies to build a light-weight, scalable and high-performance solution.
Containerised, cloud-based deployment ensures horizontal scalability, while techniques like load balancing, multi-threading, and parallel processing boost performance. A jobs queue and “hopper” further run jobs simultaneously, processing growing volumes of data and parallelised data requests.
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Integration into test automation and CI/CD
Test Data Automation has been built for environments with parallel teams, automation frameworks and CI/CD pipelines. Testers and developers can easily parameterize and reuse test data jobs using self-service forms, and the jobs can further be exposed to automation frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, and more.
A range of configurable techniques further allow test automation frameworks and CI/CD pipelines to trigger reusable jobs on-the-fly. These include a Rest API, schedulers and environment management software, or going via tools like Jenkins and Chef. For CI/CD tooling, a batch and VAR file might be used to allocate data.
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Self-service data capabilities and agility
Every utility configured in Test Data Automation is reusable and can be parameterized on demand. This goes far beyond reserving a previously created data set in a pre-defined environment. Combinable test data jobs can instead be triggered by manual and automated data requestors, breaking the dependency on an overworked test data team, and fulfilling new requests without provisioning bottlenecks.
Exposing reusable jobs in Test Data Automation’s central portal is furthermore quick and simple. Data Engineers can quickly configure self-service forms, selecting parameters, giving them intuitive names, and choosing from dropdown menus, checkboxes, text fields, and more.
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Test data utilities, integrations and vision
Test Data Automation offers the utilities needed to find, make, and allocate complete and compliant data on-the-fly.
A range of integrated utilities ensure that every parallel test, tool and engineer has exactly the right data, and no more or less. This includes data generation, masking, cloning and subsetting. A range of utilities further ensure that parallel data requesters can enjoy this rich data without delay, in on demand environments and as they run tests and develop fast-changing systems. This includes on demand data virtualisation and orchestration, as well as virtual sandboxing and data allocation.
In addition to these utilities, Test Data Automation is equipped with a wide range of connectors into DevOps tooling, and is coupled tightly with Curiosity’s Test Modeller. These integrations link Test Data Automation to user story creation and generation, automated test generation, test script generation, and more. This builds traceability across the whole DevOps pipeline, while allocating the data needed in design, development and testing.
Let's talk about your migration from legacy test data management tooling
Let us know your current approaches, why you would like to move, and how we can help. We'll be in touch.