Broadcom Test Data Manager Reviews

We use it for enterprise-level solutions.

While we are testing, when there is data that's not accessible or we need to quickly generate data, TDM comes in handy. We can create batch files as well. We can write scripts which automatically create data and we can integrate it with the automatic Dev scripts. This feature is very good. We have used these kinds of features for smaller solutions, although not at a very large scale, because of the complexities involved in the enterprise-level data.

The entire tool is good and I like the synthetic data generation, that's really good. It's valuable because you don't have Prod data so, instead, you can create multiple copies of similar data. You can write rules and create permutations and combinations according to your needs. Or you can take a snippet of the Prod data and replicate it. All of that is really helpful.

The UI could be improved and I see they are going to web-based. That's still in progress but I really hope all of that happens pretty soon and the entire UI gets migrated from the desktop to web-based.

The integration with various utilities is also really important. That still has to happen. That's a major area for improvement.

Three to five years.

It has become pretty stable over the past couple of years. When it started it had issues but right now, I don't think there are any major issues.

It's a tool so scalability depends on you use it. Scalability is pretty relative. It provides a lot of features and it's up to you how you utilize them. It's pretty scalable. It has automated features and I don't think there is any other tool in the market which provides such a level of automated solutions. The demand in the industry, with respect to enterprise solutions, is pretty complex and CA TDM is pretty good. It is scalable but not to the extent that a foolproof enterprise solution can be provided using this tool.

Support is pretty good. We get answers to problems most of the time and, if we don't, they get in touch with the tech team and we get on a call with them and we figure it out together.

The setup is of medium complexity. It's been a long time since I set it up. I have had it on my laptop for a long time, but this is what I remember. The configuration does not happen by clicking a button and then you can start using it. It has its own steps. You register the depository, etc., to get into the tool. The installation itself is fine, but configuring it and getting it ready to use could be better.

The time it takes depends. At times I have installed it in a couple of hours, but if I get stuck... I don't remember all the issues I have faced, it's been a while, but I do remember that I had issues.

Every project and every implementation have to have a strategy. There are a few basic things that we look for and we follow a checklist to see if the project is feasible for TDM or model-based testing or some other solution. As far as implementation strategies are concerned, they are very specific to the client and the kind of ecosystem the client has. The basic strategy would be to not go "big-bang," to start with the basic and medium-complexity tests to show the ROI, and then roll it out one-by-one across the enterprise. But there can be a lot of nuances in the strategy document.

In terms of the number of staff needed for deployment, to start with we would not need more than two people to perform the PoC and do due diligence on the requirements. We would need two to three people in a bigger organization and one person for a smaller solution It depends on the requirements and on how much work is involved. To maintain it, one person should be enough.

Nothing happens quickly. It requires six to eight months to show a return on investment, minimum. You are going to invest in the tool, then you are going to do training, then you are going to do roll it out. And organizations have different project teams. They have to change the mindset. That process takes time. It's good when it happens. Once you have the system in place, after something like a year-and-a-half you'll see a good enough return on investment. That's the strategy we have. But we have to convince the client so that they understand this approach.

The problem is that the cost of this tool is pretty high. Even if an organization likes the tool, at times it becomes difficult for us to sell the license. CA provides licenses for different utilities like masking but even if you break it up, the pricing is still high.

IBM Optim is one competitor as is Informatica. IBM has come up with the synthetic data feature in the last years although I don't recall the name of the tool they acquired. Informatica vs IBM Optim does not provide synthetic data yet.

Normal TDM features, like masking, are provided by both IBM and Informatica. People usually go for Informatica because it is easier for them to adopt the tool. Informatica is a very popular tool on the market for basic TDM-related activities and it's not as costly as TDM.

I have been acquainted with this tool for three-and-a-half years and, since it was acquired by CA, we have worked pretty closely with CA to give feedback on what is expected out of the tool. We have worked very closely with the developers, as well, to enhance the tool.

We have two or three clients using it.

One thing that we're using Test Data Manager for, is to build data marks so that we can test APIs of our application using users from every company within our application.

The benefits are that TDM allows us to find the right test data for the test that we need, and then it also allows us to get the required data inputs into our API test, so that we can do a full test.

One of the features that I wanted, which I think is going to be released, is to be able to create virtualized data sets, or virtualized databases. That's a feature we're going to take advantage of. All of our developers will be able to have their own virtual copy of a golden copy of our database, and be able to do transactions against their virtual copy, and then restore back to a known good checkpoint.

This solution has been very stable for us. We've gone through multiple upgrades of versioning, and each one of them gets progressively better. 

The scalability is outstanding. We're able to scale it to any size of data that we want. We can do small data sets, we can do large data sets.

On many occasions, we have sought CA's technical team to help us solve problems, and they've always been very responsive. A good relationship.

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.

If I were talking to my peer managers, I would recommend Test Data Manager - and I have, on multiple occasions - because it does allow the developer to have quick access to data that, normally, would take them hours or sometimes days to gather. 

I would say TDM, on a scale of one to 10, is probably in the eight category. It's a very solid solution. I think it can do more for us, and we're always trying to find new ways of using Test Data Manager.

Broadcom TDM's best feature is the self-service portal.

Broadcom TDM takes a long time to import documents, which wastes time that could be spent on other things. It also hasn't evolved much in the last ten years. In the next release, Broadcom should add more mining, search, and variable capabilities.

I've been using Broadcom TDM for eight to nine years.

Broadcom TDM is stable.

Broadcom TDM is scalable.

The initial setup was challenging, and I would rate it 1.5 out of 5.

An ROI is easily achievable with Broadcom TDM and can be achieved in two-and-a-half years. I would rate the ROI as four out of five.

I would rate Broadcom TDM's pricing as four out of five.

I would give Broadcom TDM a rating of eight out of ten.

We use it for data generation, for performance testing, and other test cases. We also use data masking and data profiling for functional testing. Data masking is one of the important aims in our procurement of this tool because we have some sensitive data in production. We have to mask it to use it in a testing environment. Our real concern is masking and we are learning about this subject.

CA TDM is valuable for us because we use relational databases where it's problematic to sustain the relationships, foreign keys, and indexes. TDM obeys all the relationships and does the masking and data generation according to those relationships. 

Also, the testing team is using TDM to write the rules. Using this tool, our knowledge of data discovery skills has increased. That is an advance for our company.

In terms of performance testing, before TDM, preparing the data and data generation took a week for 20,000 sets of data. Now, with TDM, it takes just one day, which is great. We haven't had much experience with masking yet, we are in the adaptation phase, but data generation has increased our performance by about 60 percent.

The tool has strong data generation functions. When we needed special function that is not in the list, the support team has generated these functions and added with patches in a limited time frame.

For performance testing, we needed large amounts of data. The effort for data generation for this purpose has also decreased specifically.

Depending on security politicies and regulations we have to obey, we needed masked production data for testing. With the help of this tool, considering data integrity we can mask the data in a variety of ways (like shuffling, using seed list, using functions etc.)

There are different modules for masking. There is a portal and there is a standalone application as well. The standalone application is more old-fashioned. When you write rules on this old-fashioned interface, because it has more complex functions available for use, you can't migrate them to the portal. 

We also have some security policies in our company that needed adaptation. For example, the people writing the rules would see all the production data, which is a large problem for us. It would be helpful if there was an increase in the ability to apply security policies.

The tool is stable. This was one of the reasons that we chose it. We haven't had an issue with any unknown problems or issues, so it has paid off.

Scalability is a matter of how you use your systems. Our requirements required using it for MS SQL Server, Db2, and LUW Db2. We scaled the tool with all the databases we have, so it's scalable.

Technical support is okay. We haven't had many issues lately, but we had a bug at the proof of concept stage and they solved it.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. One of CA's consultants came to our company and did the installation in about two days. We use mainframes here, and mainframes are very complex. Still, the consultant did it in two days.

We worked with a CA consultant to do all the adaptation over the course of about two months. We were happy with him.

Part of the licensing is dependent on whether you want to use the portal. It's based on floating users. The other part is dependent on what type of system you are using. We are using mainframe, so we paid good money for a mainframe license. It's okay because, for us, the main work of this tool is on those systems. The mainframe is a critical system, so the cost is okay.

We looked at IBM Optim and Informatica TDM.

It's important to know the requirements of your system, for example, the security policies you have to observe. The requirements may include a concern about relational or other database systems. You have to know your systems. Depending on your system, consider using one or more consultants, because we had a problem just using one. Also, compare all the tools by doing proofs of concept. That's important.

We have been using it for three months, but before that we also did a proof of concept in stages for about a year.

Regarding future use, we plan to use it in automation testing with content integration tools. Before running the automated tests, we will prepare our generated data with TDM. We also have a future plan for storage virtualization and use of Docker applications. It is possible that for Docker we would also use the TDM rule set. I want to believe it's scalable.

We have five testers using it to write rules. We also have 20 business analysts using and running these rules. In terms of maintenance, two developers would be enough. Our consultant coached our developers regarding our requirements. A testing engineer would also be okay for maintenance.

Test Data Management solution for our DevOps model, which is very useful. Data privatization (GDPR enable), synthetic test data generation, and test data provisioning are its main interesting features.

On-time production and real time data for DevOps testing environment and CI/CD pipeline.

Data privatization, provisioning, and generation for DevOps and CI/CD pipeline. 

• More features on Big Data environment data privatization. 
• Synthetic data generation on domain specific. 
• SAP test data generation for SAP testing.

Monitoring network devices using SNMP. It works very well. 

• Scalability
• The ability to have multiple pieces of information on the same screen. 

• The flexibility
• The ability to view the data the way we want it. 

More data visualization, the way that we are looking at data, we want to be able to see it in different ways. So, we are looking to expand the visualization of that data.

It is very stable. We have had issues, but we have worked through those issues with CA, and they have been successfully resolved. 

It scales very well to our network. We have a very large network. Finding a solution that can actually monitor all the devices and interfaces, this product has been able to do that.

Technical support is very good. They have performed to our expectations.

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

Due to our environment, it was complex. The product itself is simple. 

SevOne.

I would recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Stability
• The size of the company
• The ability to respond to our needs and meet our needs. 
• The breadth of software that they have available for what we are looking to do.

A lot of people, when they first started looking at the tool, started immediately jumping in and looking at the data masking, the data subsetting that it can do, and it works fantastically to help with the compliance issues for masking their data. That's a very powerful aspect of the tool.

But the part I found the best success in is actually the data generation features. In really investing into that concept of generating data from the get-go, we can get rid of any of those concerns right off the bat, since we know it's all made-up data in the first place.

We can fulfill the request of any team to very succinct and specific requirements for them each time. When I look at it as a whole, it's that data generation aspect that really is the big win for me.

When I look at the return on investment, there are not only huge financial gains on it. In fact, when I recently ran the numbers, we had about $1.1 million in savings on just the financials from 2016 alone. What it came down to is, when we started creating our data using Test Data Manager, we reduced our hours used by about 11,800 in 2016. That's real time. That's a significant, tangible benefit to the company.

When you think about it, that's somewhere around six employees that you've now saved; let alone, you have the chance to focus on all the different testing features, instead of having them worrying about where they're going to get their test data from.

It's cool that right now with this tool, they're doing a lot of things to continuously improve it. I think Test Data Management as a strategy across the whole organization, has really picked up a lot of momentum, and CA’s been intelligent to say, "We have a really great product here, and we can continue to evolve it."

Right now, they're taking everything and taking it from a desktop client and moving it into a web portal. I think there's going to be a lot of flexibility in that. If I was going to look at one thing that I am hoping they are going to improve on is – it is a great database tool – I'm not always sure about the programmatic abilities of it. Moreover, specifically, it's great in terms of referential integrity across multiple systems, multiple tables, but I do find a couple of limitations every now and then, because of trying to maintain that referential integrity; that I have to go in and try to manually make sure I want to break things.

I've been using it for about two-and-a-half years at my current position, and I've actually been familiar with the tool for about the last five or six years.

The stability is wonderful on it. I don't think that, at any point, have I had a showstopper issue with the application. It's never caused any major issues with our systems, and I will give credit where credit's due. Even right now, as they continue to enhance the tool, it has still stayed wonderfully stable through that process, and everyone on CA’s side has been there to support on any kind of small bug or enhancement that might come up along the way.

It has scaled tremendously. Especially, again, I don't want to harp back too much on it, but when you start looking at data generation, your options are endless in the way you want to incorporate that into your environment.

I have my manual testers utilizing this to create data on the fly at any moment. I have my automation users who are going through a little bit more of it, getting daily builds sent to them. I have more performance guys sending requests in for hundreds of thousands of records at any given time, that might have taken them two weeks to build out before, that I can now do in a couple hours. It ties in with our pipelines out to production.

It's a wonderful tool when it comes to the scalability.

Any time that I've had something that I question and said, "Could this potentially be a bug," or even better, "I would love this possible enhancement", it's been a quick phone call away or an email. They respond immediately, every single time, and they communicate with me, look at what our use case is on the solutions, and then come up with an answer for me, typically on the spot. It's great.

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.

It's a great package that they have out there. It's a plug-and-play kind of system, so it executes well on its own to get up and running in the first place. When they do send releases in, it's as simple as loading the new release.

What's kind of neat about it is, if they do have something that needs to be upgraded on an extension of the system, some of the repositories and things like that, it's smart enough to actually let you know that needs to happen. It's going to shut it down, take care of it itself, and then rebuild everything.

We evaluated other options when we first brought it in. We looked at a couple of the others. The reason that we ended up choosing Test Data Manager was that it was stronger, at the time at least, in its AS/400 abilities, which is what all of our legacy systems are built on. It was much more advanced than anything else that we were seeing on the market.

It’s not something that I would often give, but I do give this a perfect rating. We've been able to solve any of the data issues that we were having initially when we first brought it in, and it's expanded everything that we can do as we looked into the future right now of where we want to go with this. That includes its tie-ins for service virtualization; that includes the way that we can build out our environments in a way that we'd never considered before. It's just always a much more dynamic world that we can react a lot faster to, and attribute most all of that to Test Data Manager.

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.