Now the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come to light, business risks associated with using production data for software testing has become prohibitive, as organisations are suddenly realising that their test data management (TDM) must become a critical component for having a complete data and security policy.

Testers need rapid access to test data across a broad range of SAP solutions and integrated systems, while management needs the confidence to ensure test data is always used, stored, and processed safely in organisations.

“What the GDPR tells you, in simple terms, is that you’re supposed to have an explicit commitment with your customer to have their data. Given the certain scale of organisations is important; you must generate the data you need for any purpose and mask all personal related data,” said Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Tricentis, Wolfgang Platz.

Automating software tests

As the new GDPR has become more and more important for customers, Tricentis has had to make changes. Nevertheless, the software testing company has always focused on how it safely stores its data to ensure its customer accounts and contracts are in a well-defined state for automating software tests.

Acquiring the TDM platform Q-UP has helped Tricentis provide reliable, secure and compliant test data “on-demand”, because of its self-service interface accessing test data within a matter of seconds.

“What we have always done is generate the test data we need depending on the industry. However, test data is not the most intuitive way for data management,” commented Platz.

“In order to be a full-blown vendor in test data automation, we have had to offer production data and masking. Since we did not have that in our products, we decided to acquire Q-UP at the end of April, which was publically announced last week.”

Q-UP allows users to choose the best strategy for their development phase, architecture, and/or release cadence, including increased test coverage and synthetic test data generation.

Digital transformation

“To manage and store primary personal data, Tricentis makes sure that it doesn’t release data for testing purposes. Instead, it provides all the data in a statistic way,” added Platz.

To address TDM strategies, Tricentis advises other software businesses to make sure that its TDM strategy is considered from the beginning. In most cases, software companies begin with manual testing without thinking about TDM. Yet, automation can help this, according to Platz.

“It’s also important to find it whether to test data from production. If you are a bank with long lost loan contracts, you will need TDM. As soon as you have the appropriate use cases, you are then able to find out to which extent you should use your contract and account data to generate before transactions,” he continued.

Tricentis and QASymphony have also announced their agreement to merge under the name of Tricentis, with QASymphony’s 100+ employees joining Tricentis’ 450+ staff in a bid to keep up-to-date with digital transformation.

Written by Leah Alger