The tool offers a synthetic data feature we want to explore for its potential benefits. Apart from synthetic data, the tool provides various other features. Additionally, the tool comes with its own data importer, enabling us to manage different scenarios and enhance self-service settings, among other functionalities.

My company decided to invest in Test Data Manager because we were going through a large transformation. We were doing both a legacy system transformation and an agile transformation for our teams. Out of that spawned tons of productivity and tons of great morale boosting initiatives at the office. 

It also created tons of havoc for someone in the test data realm, because now we were working with, instead of just a couple databases on a legacy system, every database under the sun that those teams decided to work with. 

We decided to look at a bunch of different systems solutions that were out there, and we decided that TDM had the best full set of solutions available for us to be able work with the largest amount of our teams.

It is neat because as we have continued (we made that decision a couple of years go), the industries continued one of their biggest pushes which has been this idea to shift left and do continuous testing as part of a continuous delivery system. TDM has actually positioned itself very nicely to allow us to do that, because by doing things like the data creation, then I can create a fully isolated database for people to be able to work with it at the earliest stages for the unit testing and functional testing. Then, I can move them directly with the same solutions into a more integrated environment, and use the same tool set to be able to build out all the data they are going to need there and so on, as it moves down the line all the way into production.

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.

All previous solutions were homegrown and they missed the complete solution we found in CA’s TDM.

There's no other way to get good data. You can't do it manually. It has to have some solution. You need a tool because federation of the data is the most important thing that you need to be able to test with.

Our applications are very complex. When you have hundreds and hundreds of databases everywhere, how do you do that without looking for keys? If you do it manually, you're going to need a lot of people. With the tool, I work with five people on my team. Right now, we're modeling 700 different databases, and we can do it very quickly because of the tool.

We didn't use any other resolution, we simply needed to have it implemented and we tried to figure it out. We looked at the market for what we could use. TDM was our very first choice.

When you have to generate the amount of loan volume that we need – 50 states, various tax laws, etc. – I needed a solution that I can produce quality data that fits the target testing we need; any extra test cases; etc. We’re more concentrated on being very succinct in the delivery and the time frame that we need to get the testing done in.

I used CA in my previous company. I have prior working relationship with them.

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 didn't have a previous solution.

We are partners with CA, so this was one of the strategic directions my company also wanted to take. And CA had the near-perfect solution, which we thought we should invest in, together.

We were not using a previously solution. It was all home-grown items that we did out there, so a lot of automated scripting and some performance scripting that we did, in addition to manual efforts. 

As we looked at what the solutions were, some of our core features that we needed were synthetic data creation, and to be able to do complex data mining and profiling across multiple databases with referential integrity intact across them. CA's product actually came through with the highest score and met the most of our needs.

We did not use another solution before TDM.

Our team made the decision that we were going to get into DevOps and do test automation. As a way of providing our API test adequate data, we knew we needed to have a better solution than manually collecting data from databases. So we brought in Test Data Manager to work in conjunction with our app test.

We did not have a previous solution.

We were previously using a different solution, however CA purchased that solution.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because our company was dealing with a lot of transformations. Not only do we still have a large root in our legacy systems, that are the iSeries, DB2-type of systems, but we have tons and tons of applications that have been built on a much larger scale in the past 40 years, since the original solutions were rolled out. Not only did we have a legacy transition occurring within our own company, but we also changed the way that our teams were built out. We went from teams that were a waterfall, iterative, top-down approach, to a much more agile shop.

When you look at the two things together, any data solution that we were using before, maybe manual hands on keyboards, or automated scripts for it, just weren't going to cut it anymore. They weren't fast enough, and able to react enough. We started looking at it and realized that Test Data Manager by CA was the tool that could actually help to evolve that process for us.

When selecting a vendor, I wanted someone that I'm going to have actually some kind of personal relationship with. I realized that we can't always have that with everyone that we're working with, but CA has done a wonderful job of continuously reaching out and saying, “How are you doing? How are you using our product? How do you plan on using our product? Here's what we’re considering doing. Would that work for you?" They've been a wonderful partner, in terms of communication of the road map of where this is all going.

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.

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

We were previously using several products, including some in-house products. From my previous experience working with CA, I knew some of the products that they offer. While during the process of the RFP and also some of the new contracts; old contracts are getting renewed; we definitely saw it come to mind and that's how we turned to CA and started this engagement.

We were not previously using a different solution.

We were already using some CA products before, like Service Desk and ITCM, those are related to infrastructure and the computer themselves. The provider talked to use about if we wanted to get into DevOps. CA had the tools for implementing this strategy, and that is how we found out about it. We saw the demos, then we decided the solution was made for us.

We were using our own tool, DDC2 which is a homegrown tool, as well as in some areas IBM Optim.