NelsonHall has been advocating for some time that software testing services vendors should focus on automating full testing processes or testing functions, and no longer be solely focused on standalone accelerators/point solutions. This is commonly called a ‘platform’ approach, and we define platforms as pre-integrated/interfaced COTS, accelerators and open source software. The creation of testing platforms is still work in progress, with most of the work in the past two years being around DevOps platforms.

The good news is that testing services vendors are expanding their efforts from DevOps to other testing areas, driven by demand for platforms in digital, in test support activities, and in non-functional testing. More about platforms here. With this in mind, L&T Infotech (LTI) briefed NelsonHall recently on two main automation initiatives it is leading: around data-related activities, and around digital. Here I take a quick look at LTI’s data-related automation initiative.

So what’s in LTI’s Assurance platform for data testing? There are four main IPs mostly around analytics and big data, and a lot of the activity is to check consistency of data across data sources and targets. Data Testing Framework (DTF) focuses on testing data that has migrated from one EDW to another. LTI also has a BI-specific tool, OLAP Comparator, for validating data across dimensions/tables.

And then there are the challenges brought by big data and its many different data structures. With its automated testing solution BigTest, LTI focuses on several scenarios, e.g. with sources including flat files, RDBMS, and no-SQL to Hadoop.

Apart from the above IPs, LTI also has a number of accelerators mostly related to report and file comparisons, e.g. pdf, xls and xml files.

Outside of data analytics, but still in the field of data, LTI has its ETDM IP, focusing on automated test data management. This is important: test data management is a key element of test support services, along with service virtualization and environment management, in providing career testers with the required tools to proceed to testing. The key features of ETDM are:

• Data sub-setting (subsets the data from production to test environment)
• Data masking (masking clients’ sensitive data using pre-defined rules and maintaining data integrity)
• Compliance testing (for identifying data that needs to be masked and meeting data security standards such as PCI-DSS
• Synthetic test data generation (with pre-defined rules for various data types).

At this point, LTI’s Assurance platform is more a series of standalone accelerators around two main themes – analytics & big data, and test data management – although with a common look and feel. However, the good news is that LTI has worked on identifying automation gaps across those themes, and the company is continuing its efforts in automating data-related functionality gaps.

We will be commenting in a separate blog on the digital IP that LTI recently introduced.