Suresh Jetty's Q&A with Grid-Tools Ltd

Suresh Jetty is a certified user of GT Datamaker, with an Advanced Level II certification. As an accomplished Quality Test Engineer for Satyam Computer Services Ltd with experience in using a variety of test data management toolsets, we asked Suresh for his opinions about the functionality and ease of use of Datamaker.

 

Q: What value do you feel Datamaker would bring to a company?

A: The quality of a system/software directly depends on quality of the test data that is used for testing.

Datamaker will help in:

1. Delivering quality data enhancing the quality of testing

This can be ensured by covering database code by the “All pairs testing” technique, quality data masking techniques using “Customizable functions” to meet business requirements and other quantifying features which are mentioned in the advantages section of my report on datamaker.

2. Reduction in testing cycle time

This can be explained with the following example which I have faced in one of my projects;

Requirement: Creation of data for load testing. As part of load testing on a desktop application, I was asked to insert data in three tables with 100, 1000 and 10,000 rows.

Conventional way: A simple spreadsheet was used to populate the data by referring to the schema of the database objects. We populated dml statements in a spreadsheet and converted this to an SQL file and then executed the file. It took the effort of two resources for 1.5 days.

Using Datamaker: This can be done in few minutes by using Datamaker.

 

Q: What do you feel are the differentiating benefits of Datamaker over other tools in the marketplace?

A: Most tools get crippled when it comes to TDM as they are designed for a unique purpose like credit card number generation, exclusive data masking or data generation based tools. Other challenges include poor version controlling, lack of support to major databases, etc.

Also, it makes a poor business case to go for individual tool licenses for each of the TDM activities to be performed.

I feel Datamaker is the unique solution for the above pit falls of various TDM tools.

 

Q: How easy is the data generation function and would you recommend this function as a viable alternative to other methods?

A: While working on other TDM tools, I faced problems in test data generation while referring to source databases, during extraction and population of values from a particular data source (testing database, flat files, etc). Datamaker has a versatile answer to all these ambiguities.

As a simple solution, GT Datamaker has right-click options (Copy Down Row Data, Copy Down with increment, Randomize range, list of values and seed values, Sequential list of values, range and seed values) to populate data into the required columns of a table.

Apart from these, Datamaker has following powerful features:

  • Connecting to Datamaker repository to reuse the data that is already populated in the existing Datamaker test cases
  • Connecting to any source database and extract similar kind of data into the desired table
  • The ability to inherit the data

 

Q: What are the benefits of using Datamaker?

A:

  • Easy database subsetting, avoiding risky and expensive cloning techniques
  • Easy to use and powerful data masking techniques
  • Database code coverage will be assured with the “All Pairs Testing”
  • Quick creation of accurate and high volume of data with an easy to use GUI
  • Powerful version control and security
  • Supports large number of databases like Oracle, DB2, MS-SQL, MySQL, Sybase etc.
  • Can be integrated with test automation tools like QTP, Quality Center and Soap UI.
  • Inheritance of test cases that have been designed, this enables reflection of changes made in the parent test case to rest of the test cases.

 

Q: In what instances do you feel that Datamaker would be most useful?

A:

  • In tight schedules of projects where the testing team has very little time for test execution (especially Agile Testing)
  • Banking/Insurance domains especially find a significant usage of Datamaker
  • In projects which have a good number of testing types like Functional, Database, Automation, Performance, Network (seldom usage) etc., one can make use of most of the Datamaker features

 

Q: What do you feel are the most innovative features of the tool?

A:

 

Q: What features about the tool do you feel can be improved?

  • I have faced couple of situations where Datamaker got closed abruptly while performing some activities (even the activities are not valid, relevant messages should be displayed to user)
  • Establishing relationships between data while working with flat files using Datamaker

I have not found any major drawbacks with Datamaker.

 

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