Test Data Management: Curiosity Software, K2view, Mage Data
Date:
By: Daniel Howard
Classification: InComparison
Testing, and therefore test data, is an essential part of effective and compliant software development. But test data needs to be anonymised, to avoid exposing sensitive data; representative of your production data, so that your testing is meaningful; and easily accessible for your testing teams, to prevent bottlenecks in the testing process. Accomplishing all of this is the domain of Test Data Management (TDM). There are a handful of naïve approaches to test data, such as leveraging whole, raw copies of your production databases, but these are generally a bad idea. There are several reasons for this, the greatest being scale: most production databases contain far more data than is practical to expediently, and repeatedly, distribute and test. Accordingly, the TDM space is concerned with more efficient alternatives, primarily data subsetting, synthetic data generation, and database virtualisation. These methods are often used alongside data masking and sensitive data discovery functionality.
In this comparative report, we discuss three leading TDM vendors, in respect to all of these capabilities and more. The vendors considered are Curiosity Software, a test automation product with a particular emphasis on test data automation; K2view, a broadly applicable data management platform that includes TDM; and Mage Data, a data privacy and security solution that leverages its market-leading sensitive data discovery as part of its TDM capability.