Marketing description

Your organization depends on business-critical applications to drive results. But it is a challenge to stay within tight budgets, while striving to speed the deployment of applications, upgrades and enhancements. Creating realistic and consistent application development and testing environments is the first step in delivering reliable applications, enhancements and upgrades. However, cloning large production databases for testing purposes increases the time needed to run test cases. In addition, cloned data may not support the specific error and boundary conditions required for effective testing. Special test cases may be required before testing can begin. Lastly, manually validating test results is often time consuming and error prone. With so much test data to manage, costs can quickly spiral. Testing cycles are extended. Maintenance burdens increase. Rolling out features requires much more of your organization's time and resources.
Your ultimate goal is to deliver reliable application functionality to support operational best practices, stay competitive and generate revenue. So how can you support rapid application deployment and reduce costs, without sacrificing quality? The IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution offers proven technology to optimize and automate processes that create and manage data in non-production (testing, development and training) environments. Developers and quality assurance testers can create realistic, "right-sized" test databases, create targeted test scenarios, protect privacy and compare "before" and "after" test results with speed and accuracy.

Key selling points

• Apply subsetting capabilities to create referentially intact, "right-sized" test databases
• Create targeted test scenarios to force error and boundary conditions
• Automate test result comparisons to identify hidden errors
• Easily refresh and maintain "production-like" test environments
• Shorten iterative testing cycles and accelerate time to market

Product features

• Creating production-like environments for application testing
  In contrast to cloning large production databases, a more effective alternative is to implement test data management and subsetting capabilities that minimize storage requirements, while expanding test coverage. It is much faster to test with smaller, realistic subsets that accurately reflect the production data, without adding overhead to the testing process. Optim provides the capabilities to create referentially intact subsets of application data needed for testing. Optim's relationship engine represents a unique, proven technology that identifies, navigates and intelligently processes data relationships and extracts precise subsets of related data, no matter how complex the data model. Subsetting capabilities allow you to accurately capture realistic application test data and reduce capacity requirements for multiple testing environments. Optim also provides capabilities for capturing related data among multiple integrated applications and databases.
• Protecting privacy in development, testing and training environments
  Optim also offers a variety of methods for masking test data to protect privacy and support regulatory compliance initiatives. Unique table and column mapping capabilities help you map specific target test data. Sites can leverage context-aware data masking routines to de-identify key data elements across your applications. Optim captures and accurately processes application data elements so that the masked data does not violate application logic and produces valid results. This solution includes built-in lookup tables and prepackaged routines that support transforming complex data elements, such as social security numbers, credit card numbers and e-mail addresses. You can also incorporate site-specific data transformation routines, integrating the processing logic from multiple related applications and databases.
• Force error conditions
  Another way to optimize your testing environment is to create targeted test scenarios. Optim includes comprehensive relational editing capabilities that not only simplify the tasks necessary to create this special data, but also make it easy to browse data and resolve application errors. A simplistic, one-dimensional view of your test data is insufficient. Optim provides capabilities for browsing and editing data in its relational or business context across multiple tables, which offers a better way to envision the data relationships and structure of the application data model. Practical and intuitive commands simplify relational editing and ensure data integrity. You can easily edit test data to trigger error or boundary conditions and to verify exception handling during testing. For example, if diagnostic codes are four digits, and range in value from 0001 to 1000, then a forced value of 2000 would trigger an error in the context of the application test. A powerful undo capability allows you to reverse an unlimited number of editing changes. A sophisticated audit facility tracks changes and saves details for review by authorized users.
• Automate data comparisons and analyze results
  The ability to analyze and validate test results is critical for ensuring application quality. The database size and complexity significantly increase the effort involved in examining test results. After a test run, Optim analyzes the "before" and "after" images of the test data, automatically detects any differences and presents the results in a concise report. You can browse comparison results in a highlighted display for easy analysis - saving countless hours. Optim improves all phases of application testing. An intuitive, online interface and full-function browse utility eliminate time-consuming and error-prone table-by-table comparisons. Optim not only identifies the expected database changes, but also uncovers differences that might otherwise go undetected. Those application defects that are hidden or difficult to trace can be identified quickly and resolved at a fraction of the cost. Compare specifications can be saved, reused and shared to improve consistency and productivity.