News

Parasoft Updates Tackle Test Data Management

• By David Ramel
• May 3, 2019

Parasoft, an automated software testing specialist, has updated its functional testing tools with what it claims is a radical new approach to address a traditional, time-consuming bottleneck that has complicated and hindered current solutions: test data management.

Managing test data has heretofore entailed upfront costs of building initial data models for use in testing, a process that requires specialized skills to acquire deep expertise with or knowledge of an entire underlying data inventory, the company said.

The new process lets testers create complex data objects without needing to understand the inner workings of a database being used in testing. Instead, testers can record database interactions -- or API interactions -- and automatically generate simulated test data. What's more, this way of building data models automatically by processing these interactions, or traffic, can be done via a browser-based, thin-client interface used to manage test data.

This technique is combined with service virtualization, used to simulate services that undergo various state transitions in order to test applications such as shopping carts or banking apps.

"Leveraging our experience with service virtualization, we created a new technique where users can simply record their interactions with their dependent databases or APIs, and generate both virtual services as well as simulated test data," the company said in a blog post. "There's no upfront work required to build a data model because the data model is built automatically by processing the traffic. In the Web browser, users can take a self-service approach to building the data required to satisfy their use cases, through simple and intuitive visual diagramming that enables them to mask, reshape, subset, and generate vast amounts of data."

This new functionality comes in updates to the company's Parasoft SOAtest (API and UI functional testing) and Parasoft Virtualize (a service virtualization solution for virtual test environments).

Parasoft said those tools were also enhanced with:

• Improved reporting and data aggregation: "Parasoft SOAtest can now publish reports into Parasoft's centralized reporting and analytics hub, allowing users to aggregate data from functional and non-functional testing practices as well as unit testing and static analysis results. This functionality gives leadership a portfolio-level view of their application's health and release readiness."
• Environment-based association for jobs configuration: "Through the enhanced 'jobs' UI in Parasoft SOAtest, users can take an environment-based approach to testing, first specifying the environment in which their tests will execute and then dynamically swap out variable information such as endpoints, data sources, etc."