Broadcom Test Data Manager Reviews

One of the most valuable features to us is synthetic data generation. We generate a lot of synthetic data for our performance testing and bulging up our performance environment to see how much load they can sustain. We've been doing it for relational data structures.

At a recent conference, I was talking to the product management team. We have a big use case for synthetic data generated for non-relational data structures. They have it on their road map, but we would love to see that coming out very soon. With modernization, relational databases are going away and the non-relational databases are coming up. That's a big use case for us, especially with the Grav database. We have a big, huge Grav database. We need to generate a lot of synthetic data for that.

It has really changed the culture in the company because nobody could ever imagine generating millions of records. Even production systems have just a couple of million records. When you want to test your applications with three or four times the production load, you can never actually achieve it because there is no other way besides synthetic data generation. You can’t have that volume of data in your DBs. Even if you subset your entire production, you would get just one X of it. To get three or four X of it, you have to go to either data cloning or to synthetic data generation.

The solution can really improve on non-relational data structures because that's a big industry use case which we are foreseeing, with non-relational database structures. I talk about databases. I talk about request-response pairs; the services data generation. We use it so much for virtualization. If we could create the web services request-response pairs non-relationally supporting GET, POST, and so on; that would be a big win for us.

I've been using CA Test Data Manager since it was first released as Datamaker about 2.5 years ago. I've been using it pretty regularly since then. It has undergone a big, big transformation. There is a lot of good stuff coming up.

We still use the old tech line version of it, but we have seen the demos as it's moving to the web interface. I think its going to be very stable going down the line.

It is not very scalable because even to generate maybe a couple of million records, it takes six to seven hours. If cloud muscle power could be included with it – like if the synthetic data generation can be done using a cloud instance; it's all synthetic data, so nothing is PII in it – if you could have a cloud feature where the data can be generated in the cloud, which might have multi-GB of RAM in memory, that would be great for us.

Technical support is getting better. It's getting better and slower at the same time. That is because when I started my interaction with Grid Tools, it used to work on the bleeding edge of technology. Whatever enhancements we used to submit, the turnaround time was a couple of weeks and we would get whatever we need, whatever new features we needed. The processes were really ad-hoc. Rather than writing support tickets, you would literally reach out to somebody who you know who really works on the product. You reach out to them and they keep passing your ticket or enhancement request from person to person. Now the process is very much streamlined, but we have lost that turnaround time capability.

When selecting a vendor, my personal requirements would be: the tools should be stable and there should be a knowledge repository for it. When you see the PPT presentation, it just gives you an introduction about the tool and it gives you the capabilities of the tool. To really get your hands dirty, you need an intense video or documentation to work on it.

I think the more webinars you do, the better. If you can record the webinars, archive them, that would be great. If you could try to solve some more complex use cases in your demos, that would be great. Most companies give you a demo of new features with zero complexity. Actually, when looking at the demo, and you are trying to solve your own use cases, you just get choked. You can't proceed any further because your use cases are really more complex than what was being shown in the demo. From the recovery aspect, if they can come up with more intense videos which shows real complex use cases, that's going to be great.

We started the TDM journey due to our data masking needs.

It doesn’t only cover our data masking needs, but also our data subsetting and synthetic data generation needs. Finally, it gave us the idea of making test data as a service within our organization.

The current version of the product is composed of several sub applications and the UI screens of those apps are not user-friendly enough. We are expecting that existing product should be merged to a single web based application supporting HTML5.

I have about three months of experience. We haven’t installed the product yet. We are at the beginning of the implementation phase.

We are not using it right now. This is the first time we are using the TDM solution. We are just about to install the product. We have not seen any stability issues yet.

We will see about scalability when we implement the product. We are just beginning the implementation phase. We are just about to install the product right now in the production environment.

For technical support, we are fine.

We reviewed different products, like Informatica TDM or IBM Optim. Finally, we decided on the CA TDM solution. This looks like a very Agile product that continues to be enhanced.

Inside the TDM, there are data makers, or different kind of sub-applications. Now they are moving to a single web application interface on TDM.

The most valuable features for us are masking, data profiling, and creating data subsets. More specifically, we are able to assist our clients with data privacy and the regulatory recommendations that come from the government. We help them to comply with PI, IP, HI and PCI regulations.

CA Test Data Manager is enormously helpful to us. We assist our customers by speeding up the application development process using real-time test data and synthetic test data, which mimics the real test data.

Integration

CA Test Data Manager is pretty stable, but integration is where we are looking for some improvements.

It is fairly scalable for the implementations I've participated in. We haven't yet utilized the current available capacity.

I would give technical support 8/10. Generally, we get a solution to an issue, but we have to go through multiple iterations before we get a complete resolution.

Previous to implementing Test Data Manager all our work was done manually. We used custom SQL scripts, but because of ICD regulatory recommendations, we switched to Test Data Manager.

Initial setup was complex in comparison to other solutions for which we did proof-of-concept. There are a lot of contact points with the TDM suite, which I personally felt increased the complexity.

We evaluated Delphix and IBM, as well as CA Test Data Manager. One of the reasons we chose CA, aside from the fact that we are CA partners, is due to support for PCI and PHI in terms of faster test data generation. The biggest differentiation was in generating test cases from the data. CA implemented this for test matching and then integrated it with Agile Requirements Designer. That tipped the scales in favor of CA TDM.

When choosing a vendor, we look for continuous innovation and continued support. Continuous innovation can release features into the market ahead of other vendors. So that's something we always look for.

My recommendation is to perform a detailed evaluation. If only simple, straightforward, and small-scale test data management is needed, I don’t think a large solution such as CA TDM is necessary. To justify the cost of CA TDM, you need to have need for large-scale test data management.

Automation tests are more stable so they can be run more continuously.

The most valuable feature of the product is its ability to generate and scrub test data. You can use it to pull data down from production and remove the customers' private data. There is reliable automation so that your automated tests can run over and over again without failing due to bad data. It has a fairly intuitive UI and there is support when you need it.

I would like to see more support for generating the data for loading performance.

This product is stable enough.

We haven't had any issues so far, so I guess I'd say I'm comfortable with the scalability right now.

We didn't have a solution in place before we selected this software. Automation testing was new and as soon as the automation tests started being developed, the need for data came very quickly. I think being able to locate help and people that know how to do implementation and setup when you get stuck brought us to this solution. At some point, you need to decide to either build or buy.

When you do your implementation, find an experienced implementer to get it set up and get it done right the first time.

Data masking and synthetic data generation.

By using this product we are able to provide test data for the development and testing teams. It has removed the dependency of making production data available for development and testing activities. Using data masking techniques we can comply the rule of non-disclosure of personally identifiable information

Automating repetitive tasks.

More than one year.

By using different functionalities of CA Test Data Manager, we were able to mask and deploy the data very easily to various environments.

Product is quite stable but it has some functional bugs which are fixed as soon as they are reported to the support team.

Yes, the product is quite helpful to suffice our data masking and synthetic data generation requirement.

8 out of 10

9 out of 10, all our queries and functional defects were resolved within very little time. CA technical support people are proactive and we get the fixes in very little time.

No, we didn’t use any other tool beforehand.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. We just require a license and a native server, after installation the product will be available for all users under the server.

We implemented this in-house.

No, we didn’t evaluate other options. We had researched this tool and then chose it for our requirements.

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.