“I have cloned old copies from 2014, to roll back pretty much every test scenario.” —Tester Running transactional testing or regression scripts that often modify the test data means every tester naturally wants to hoard environments to get it back to its previous state for another test run. It’s often difficult or impossible to repurpose a test environment amid a test. But with so many parallel development cycles, piles of test environments can quickly stack up with old data, different versions of schemasnever mind sucking up the AWS budget. CONFESSIONS That’s recipe for draining QA productivity-never mind risking a breach. It’s great to collect things such as vacation photos, Likes, bucket list checkoffs—but test environments aren’t one of them. “P0 bug fixes often go out to the customer pretty much untested.” —Tester P0 is the defect with a 24-hour turnaround to fix and an SLA attached to it. The priority is to get it out the door and back in customers’ hands ASAP. Without good data to run tests again, it’s way too easy for the fix to be delivered, without time for a full QA cycle. It's because it's nearly impossible to get test data availability across multiple teams, applications, and release versions. Teams often contend for limited shared environments, resulting in the serialization of critical application projects. That's sowing the seeds for a major customer bust up down the road. TESTER DBA 5 “I like to hang out with the production guys for lunch— it’s why I never ask them for fresh test data.” —Tester Asking for a fresh set of data from production is often a conversation killer. Because it means running extracts off-hours, or worse, slowing down production performance. That’ll make anyone less popular. Most IT organizations still use a request-fulfill model for production copies, in which testers often find their requests queuing behind others. It gets more painful if cuts of production data have to be synced from multiple sources across heterogeneous sources. That means environments often take days or weeks to provision. It all puts a strain on team relations, not only ruining With the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform, QA can provision the environments they need, on-demand in minutes. With Data Pods, they can snapshot and rewind test data to reduce the number of discrete test environments. Why Testers Love Delphix More testing— no environment hoarding Delphix Data Pods provide full lunch plans version control—self-service access but test data in minutes. Full rollback, rewind, and to any version in time from any source snapshots are the perfect antidote refreshes too. to hoarding test environments. Fresh data —no waiting With a self-service portal, QA can “We increased the velocity of our internal testing cycles—not only how quickly they went, but also the number we could complete in a defined period of time. As a result, we can introduce new capabilities to our business much faster than we were able to before.” cut fresh data from across multiple environments and provision synchronized copies to non-production environments, automating the whole process target database initialization, configuration, and validation, so that it can all be set up in minutes. Data virtualization speeds up refresh times to minutes. —Chris Kohl | CIO, Vertex Inc. CONFESSIONS TESTER DBA 7