We see K2view as a strategic partner.
Not only do we provide constant feedback on the product’s capabilities, but we also share our requirements as they emerge, in a joint effort to shape the future product roadmap.
Senior Director
Software Development and Engineering
The business impact of K2tdm
After implementing the K2view test data management solution,
the bank quickly realized a:
40% increase in productivity
of test data provisioning
50% increase in time-to-value
of software releases
80% decrease in staff
provisioning test data
1 of the 10 largest banks in the US, this global financial services company provides banking, consulting, investing, and wealth management services to both institutional and retail clients.
The bank’s 30,000+ employees serve over 4 million banking and corporate retirement plan clients via hundreds of branches in the US and Europe.
After multiple mergers and acquisitions, including acquisitions of acquisitions, the bank realized that it needed to establish a Test Data Management Center of Excellence to provision test data from an increasingly complex and heterogeneous data and technology stack.
Until then, it relied on a variety of home-grown test data tools developed by various data teams in the bank’s different departments.
Key Challenges
There were many lessons the bank learned from its various in-house efforts, prior to the recent spate of M&A activity.
There was a definitive need for:
- Access to new underlying technologies
The bank had problems integrating with databases like Aerospike and Google BigQuery, and DB2 data extractions were taking too long.
- Enterprise-grade test data
The test data lacked consistency, integrity, and quality, resulting in false-negative and false-positive test results.
- One test data provisioning tool
A single, robust solution, with embedded best practices, that supports the needs of all dev and QA teams, across the bank, was required.
- A centralized test data warehouse
It was impossible to reserve test data to avoid testers from overriding each other's test data and it took a lot of effort to revert back to, and reuse, a dataset after it had been altered in a test cycle.
- Better compliance with privacy laws
The test data was not being masked adequately or quickly enough.
- Integration with CI/CD pipelines
The bank’s in-house tools weren’t built to integrate with the bank’s DevOps CI/CD pipelines, making test data automation unachievable.
To address these challenges, the bank issued a detailed Request for Proposal (RFP) to the leading test data management solution providers. After being short-listed, K2view was 1 of 2 vendors asked to deliver a Proof of Concept (POC).
Key Goals
K2view was selected because it readily handled the intricacies and demands of the bank’s testing requirements, including:
- 25 data sources, including DB2, MongoDB, Oracle, Postgres, YugabyteDB, and more
- 4 testing environments, and the need to easily provision data between them
- Test data provisioning and subsetting, made simple and quick
- Creation of a centralized team, to receive the requests and serve the test data
- Embedded data masking, to comply with privacy laws
- Synthetic data generation capabilities, to augment scarce production data in the future
- API support, to accommodate full automation and to enable the integration of test data provisioning into the bank’s CI/CD pipeline.
- Test data reservation, versioning, and rollback, for enhanced tester productivity.
- Rollout across the entire organization, to replace all home-grown tools
- Support of on-prem and cloud deployments
- Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Results
The bank established a Test Data Management Center of Excellence supported by a team of K2view-trained implementors, and rapidly achieved a:
- 40% increase in productivity related to test data provisioning
- 50% increase in time-to-value of software releases due to better test data quality
- 80% decrease in staff needed to provision test data (from 50 to 10 FTEs)
The resounding success of the test data management implementation has led the bank to further engage K2view in other initiatives, such as customer 360, data migration, and legacy application modernization.
