Client
German Financial Major
The client is a diversified financial institution in Germany. They approached Hexaware to test the migration of their legacy-based in-house banking system to a new product-based core banking system.
Challenge
Complex Test Data Requirements in a Large-Scale Core Banking Migration
The bank’s core banking initiative was massive, involving over 200 functional specifications and more than 70 interfacing systems. The challenge was to provide test data management support in a multi-vendor environment where test teams were working from more than 10 locations in five countries.
Requirements included:
- Plug data directly into the test scripts based on requirements
- Provide bulk data and eliminate turnaround time
- Need for a high volume of test data supply in a short time
- Execution downtime due to slower turnaround in provisioning test data
- Addressing complex data requirements with unique real-time conditions
Solution
Data Plug-in Solution for Efficient Test Data Management
To expedite testing, a quick-fix data plug-in solution was developed. This simple and easy-to-use approach enables testers and business users to create effective test data, facilitating the faster execution of test cases and scripts. The data plug-in streamlines test data management in complex testing environments, accelerating data preparation and enhancing overall testing efficiency.
Key Features
- Core Advantages: Accelerates test data selection and preparation, leading to reduced time to market and improved testing quality.
- User Interface and Functionality: Builds queries or procedures based on user-provided selection criteria, triggered by an SQL engine to fetch data from specified sources in selected test environments.
- Configurability: Highly configurable and parameterized, with queries verified for syntax compliance before execution via an interface command.
- Output and Export: Displays fetched results in a table format, exportable to Excel or Notepad.
- Integration: Integrated with test management tools like HP’s QC, allowing results to be pushed directly into QC and plugged into respective test scripts.
- Agility and Support: Agile in handling test data requirements, with a query builder interface for identifying data sets in scenarios involving similar or repeated requests in large business software implementations.
- Access Strategy: Made available to testing teams beyond the test data management team, eliminating direct test database access to prevent pollution and corruption from multiple users.
- Addressing Key Aspects: Covers test data automation by automating processes without overhead, test data generation through query-based fetching, and overall test data management by optimizing requirements to shorten the preparation life cycle.
Benefits
Reduced Errors, Effort Savings, and Budget Optimization
The data plug-in solution used here secures data manipulations and nullifies human error in the data identification process, leading to faster, cleaner test cycles with measurable savings:
- ~30% of typical defects stem from improper test data. We reduced these data-related errors by eliminating manual data identification and enforcing consistent TDM controls.
- ~30% less TDM effort and execution downtime by applying quality procedures and optimizing the end-to-end test data flow.
- 10% lower testing budgets on large engagements by pairing the accelerator with optimization practices.
- Accelerated time-to-market and smoother releases through scalable, repeatable data provisioning across vendors and geographies.
Summary
By shifting from ad-hoc data hunts to a governed, self-service TDM model, the bank executed over 100,000 scripts across releases with fewer data-related defects, less effort, and downtime (≈approximately 30%), as well as lower overall testing spend (≈approximately 10%). The approach scaled across geographies and vendors, improving test quality and release velocity while protecting sensitive data.
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