Using Datamaker™ in the development lifecycle
"It was easy to train our testers to use Datamaker. The tool has an intuitive look and feel and they acquired the principles of the Datamaker operation quickly and were up and running in a short time with very little support."
Chris Mercer,
VocaLink
Test data management from Analyst, to Developer, to DBA to Tester!
Datamaker™ is an extremely powerful toolset that can be used throughout the entire development lifecycle. Building, editing, checking, and testing data are activities that are familiar to all IT professionals.
Datamaker™ can be used from the initial design of your application through to development, testing and ongoing maintenance. From the analyst being able to specify what the application data should look like through to DBAs managing different versions of databases, Datamaker™ can be of great assistance.
Job functions and features - how would you use Datamaker™?
- Browsing existing data to verify any assumptions using business rules
- By having a formal method of specifying what input and output data should look when specifying new functionality
- Defining a meta model of table and entity relationships
- Creating appropriate data from specifications created by analysts
- Editing and building accurate data to act as input to screens and batch
- Comparing data before and after tests to verify, delete, insert and update functionality is working as expected
- Comparing differences between table structures and objects between releases
- Comparing differences between table structures and objects between releases
- Helping to create subset or smaller versions of development databases
- Many DBA wizards to create and manage schema objects
- Generating accurate test data to exercise the majority of code
- Comparing data before and after tests for integrity and changes
- Generating disparate high volume data for performance testing
- Manage Quality centre or other capture replay scripts centrally
- Building a valuable repository of testing assets for use in multiple projects
- Comparing differences between table structures and objects between releases
- Providing structure, re-usability and best practice across projects
Analyst
Most analysts will specify what data needs to be input into a process and what data is created or updated as part of that process. Datamaker™ allows the analyst to create clear specifications of the data to be fed into and out of a process. This specification can then be referred to as part of the design documentation and directly used by the developer.
Developer
Most developers spend time manually modifying existing data or building new data to use during development. Datamaker™ can make this a much easier and more structured task. The powerful data browsing editing and data creation screen is easy to use and will save developers many hours of often tedious and difficult data manipulation.
DBA
Most DBAs have to manage the infrastructure supporting multiple production, testing and development databases. Datamaker™ can help the DBA build smaller subset databases as well as provide a structured method of scrambling data when extracting the data from production.
Testers
Datamaker™ helps the tester quickly expand the coverage of their testing by being able to exercise more combinations of scenarios automatically. Data can be extracted by the tool and used by Quality Center or other capture replay scripts created by Datamaker™ to drive screen replay and performance testing harnesses.
Managers
The manager has to control numerous competing priorities. As part of this balancing act implementing standards, best practice and reusability is key to reducing risk and hitting budgets. Datamaker™ will improve development and testing procedures within a matter of days and will help you reuse work across product releases and different applications.