Broadcom Test Data Manager Reviews

We use it for enterprise-level solutions.

While we are testing, when there is data that's not accessible or we need to quickly generate data, TDM comes in handy. We can create batch files as well. We can write scripts which automatically create data and we can integrate it with the automatic Dev scripts. This feature is very good. We have used these kinds of features for smaller solutions, although not at a very large scale, because of the complexities involved in the enterprise-level data.

The entire tool is good and I like the synthetic data generation, that's really good. It's valuable because you don't have Prod data so, instead, you can create multiple copies of similar data. You can write rules and create permutations and combinations according to your needs. Or you can take a snippet of the Prod data and replicate it. All of that is really helpful.

The UI could be improved and I see they are going to web-based. That's still in progress but I really hope all of that happens pretty soon and the entire UI gets migrated from the desktop to web-based.

The integration with various utilities is also really important. That still has to happen. That's a major area for improvement.

Three to five years.

It has become pretty stable over the past couple of years. When it started it had issues but right now, I don't think there are any major issues.

It's a tool so scalability depends on you use it. Scalability is pretty relative. It provides a lot of features and it's up to you how you utilize them. It's pretty scalable. It has automated features and I don't think there is any other tool in the market which provides such a level of automated solutions. The demand in the industry, with respect to enterprise solutions, is pretty complex and CA TDM is pretty good. It is scalable but not to the extent that a foolproof enterprise solution can be provided using this tool.

Support is pretty good. We get answers to problems most of the time and, if we don't, they get in touch with the tech team and we get on a call with them and we figure it out together.

The setup is of medium complexity. It's been a long time since I set it up. I have had it on my laptop for a long time, but this is what I remember. The configuration does not happen by clicking a button and then you can start using it. It has its own steps. You register the depository, etc., to get into the tool. The installation itself is fine, but configuring it and getting it ready to use could be better.

The time it takes depends. At times I have installed it in a couple of hours, but if I get stuck... I don't remember all the issues I have faced, it's been a while, but I do remember that I had issues.

Every project and every implementation have to have a strategy. There are a few basic things that we look for and we follow a checklist to see if the project is feasible for TDM or model-based testing or some other solution. As far as implementation strategies are concerned, they are very specific to the client and the kind of ecosystem the client has. The basic strategy would be to not go "big-bang," to start with the basic and medium-complexity tests to show the ROI, and then roll it out one-by-one across the enterprise. But there can be a lot of nuances in the strategy document.

In terms of the number of staff needed for deployment, to start with we would not need more than two people to perform the PoC and do due diligence on the requirements. We would need two to three people in a bigger organization and one person for a smaller solution It depends on the requirements and on how much work is involved. To maintain it, one person should be enough.

Nothing happens quickly. It requires six to eight months to show a return on investment, minimum. You are going to invest in the tool, then you are going to do training, then you are going to do roll it out. And organizations have different project teams. They have to change the mindset. That process takes time. It's good when it happens. Once you have the system in place, after something like a year-and-a-half you'll see a good enough return on investment. That's the strategy we have. But we have to convince the client so that they understand this approach.

The problem is that the cost of this tool is pretty high. Even if an organization likes the tool, at times it becomes difficult for us to sell the license. CA provides licenses for different utilities like masking but even if you break it up, the pricing is still high.

IBM Optim is one competitor as is Informatica. IBM has come up with the synthetic data feature in the last years although I don't recall the name of the tool they acquired. Informatica vs IBM Optim does not provide synthetic data yet.

Normal TDM features, like masking, are provided by both IBM and Informatica. People usually go for Informatica because it is easier for them to adopt the tool. Informatica is a very popular tool on the market for basic TDM-related activities and it's not as costly as TDM.

I have been acquainted with this tool for three-and-a-half years and, since it was acquired by CA, we have worked pretty closely with CA to give feedback on what is expected out of the tool. We have worked very closely with the developers, as well, to enhance the tool.

We have two or three clients using it.

One of the most valuable features to us is synthetic data generation. We generate a lot of synthetic data for our performance testing and bulging up our performance environment to see how much load they can sustain. We've been doing it for relational data structures.

At a recent conference, I was talking to the product management team. We have a big use case for synthetic data generated for non-relational data structures. They have it on their road map, but we would love to see that coming out very soon. With modernization, relational databases are going away and the non-relational databases are coming up. That's a big use case for us, especially with the Grav database. We have a big, huge Grav database. We need to generate a lot of synthetic data for that.

It has really changed the culture in the company because nobody could ever imagine generating millions of records. Even production systems have just a couple of million records. When you want to test your applications with three or four times the production load, you can never actually achieve it because there is no other way besides synthetic data generation. You can’t have that volume of data in your DBs. Even if you subset your entire production, you would get just one X of it. To get three or four X of it, you have to go to either data cloning or to synthetic data generation.

The solution can really improve on non-relational data structures because that's a big industry use case which we are foreseeing, with non-relational database structures. I talk about databases. I talk about request-response pairs; the services data generation. We use it so much for virtualization. If we could create the web services request-response pairs non-relationally supporting GET, POST, and so on; that would be a big win for us.

I've been using CA Test Data Manager since it was first released as Datamaker about 2.5 years ago. I've been using it pretty regularly since then. It has undergone a big, big transformation. There is a lot of good stuff coming up.

We still use the old tech line version of it, but we have seen the demos as it's moving to the web interface. I think its going to be very stable going down the line.

It is not very scalable because even to generate maybe a couple of million records, it takes six to seven hours. If cloud muscle power could be included with it – like if the synthetic data generation can be done using a cloud instance; it's all synthetic data, so nothing is PII in it – if you could have a cloud feature where the data can be generated in the cloud, which might have multi-GB of RAM in memory, that would be great for us.

Technical support is getting better. It's getting better and slower at the same time. That is because when I started my interaction with Grid Tools, it used to work on the bleeding edge of technology. Whatever enhancements we used to submit, the turnaround time was a couple of weeks and we would get whatever we need, whatever new features we needed. The processes were really ad-hoc. Rather than writing support tickets, you would literally reach out to somebody who you know who really works on the product. You reach out to them and they keep passing your ticket or enhancement request from person to person. Now the process is very much streamlined, but we have lost that turnaround time capability.

When selecting a vendor, my personal requirements would be: the tools should be stable and there should be a knowledge repository for it. When you see the PPT presentation, it just gives you an introduction about the tool and it gives you the capabilities of the tool. To really get your hands dirty, you need an intense video or documentation to work on it.

I think the more webinars you do, the better. If you can record the webinars, archive them, that would be great. If you could try to solve some more complex use cases in your demos, that would be great. Most companies give you a demo of new features with zero complexity. Actually, when looking at the demo, and you are trying to solve your own use cases, you just get choked. You can't proceed any further because your use cases are really more complex than what was being shown in the demo. From the recovery aspect, if they can come up with more intense videos which shows real complex use cases, that's going to be great.

One thing that we're using Test Data Manager for, is to build data marks so that we can test APIs of our application using users from every company within our application.

The benefits are that TDM allows us to find the right test data for the test that we need, and then it also allows us to get the required data inputs into our API test, so that we can do a full test.

One of the features that I wanted, which I think is going to be released, is to be able to create virtualized data sets, or virtualized databases. That's a feature we're going to take advantage of. All of our developers will be able to have their own virtual copy of a golden copy of our database, and be able to do transactions against their virtual copy, and then restore back to a known good checkpoint.

This solution has been very stable for us. We've gone through multiple upgrades of versioning, and each one of them gets progressively better. 

The scalability is outstanding. We're able to scale it to any size of data that we want. We can do small data sets, we can do large data sets.

On many occasions, we have sought CA's technical team to help us solve problems, and they've always been very responsive. A good relationship.

Our team made the decision that we were going to get into DevOps and do test automation. As a way of providing our API test adequate data, we knew we needed to have a better solution than manually collecting data from databases. So we brought in Test Data Manager to work in conjunction with our app test.

If I were talking to my peer managers, I would recommend Test Data Manager - and I have, on multiple occasions - because it does allow the developer to have quick access to data that, normally, would take them hours or sometimes days to gather. 

I would say TDM, on a scale of one to 10, is probably in the eight category. It's a very solid solution. I think it can do more for us, and we're always trying to find new ways of using Test Data Manager.

We are using it to implement test data management.

It is a new implementation so there were some challenges. But so far, it has been good.

The most valuable feature is the Portal that comes with the tool. That helps make it look much more user-friendly for the users. 

Also its ease of use - even for developers it's not that complicated.

It gives us the ability to 

• mask the data
• sub-set the data
• synthetically generate test data
• create test data for specific business case scenarios

and more.

• Addition of more data sources.
• Make the Portal a little more user-friendly, make it even easier to configure things directly from the Portal.

It is stable, but it is not where even CA wants it to be. There have been numerous releases going on and there are still some we are waiting for. But, overall it's good.

It is scalable. This particular tool is  used by certain types of engineers, TDM engineers. But the recipient of the tool can be anybody so it can be scaled for as many licenses as the customer is willing to pay for. It's kind of expensive.

Tech support has been very helpful.

They have been responsive as best they can. I'm assuming that they're very busy, and they are. They usually respond within the same day. And usually the requests that go to the technical support side are not that simple either, so I can understand that.

We are partners with CA, so this was one of the strategic directions my company also wanted to take. And CA had the near-perfect solution, which we thought we should invest in, together.

It was good. There were some issues. It wasn't as smooth as we had thought.

We ran into a network issue, a firewall issue, things like that. It wasn't something we could not fix. We worked with the CA support and with the client's team to fix it. But there were issues, it took a lot of time to install and configure.

We are a consulting company, so when we go to a client we do an evaluation. Often we have to tell them what about the different products we evaluated. So in this case CA TDM has competition: Informatica has a similar product called Informatica TDM; IBM has a similar product called IBM InfoSphere Optim. These are the main competitors of CA.

When selecting a vendor the important criteria are 

• ease of use
• responsiveness of the technical support
• forward-looking products. By that I mean, do they have a plan for the next three months, six months, year, not just make the product and then forgot about it.

For this particular area, test data management, because I am involved in evaluating other companies' products as well, CA so far is the leader. I personally compare each feature for all the companies we evaluate. So far CA is the number one. There is still some improvement to be done, which CA is aware of. But I think I would advise a colleague that we can start with CA.

Data masking and synthetic data generation.

By using this product we are able to provide test data for the development and testing teams. It has removed the dependency of making production data available for development and testing activities. Using data masking techniques we can comply the rule of non-disclosure of personally identifiable information

Automating repetitive tasks.

More than one year.

By using different functionalities of CA Test Data Manager, we were able to mask and deploy the data very easily to various environments.

Product is quite stable but it has some functional bugs which are fixed as soon as they are reported to the support team.

Yes, the product is quite helpful to suffice our data masking and synthetic data generation requirement.

8 out of 10

9 out of 10, all our queries and functional defects were resolved within very little time. CA technical support people are proactive and we get the fixes in very little time.

No, we didn’t use any other tool beforehand.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. We just require a license and a native server, after installation the product will be available for all users under the server.

We implemented this in-house.

No, we didn’t evaluate other options. We had researched this tool and then chose it for our requirements.

Test Data Management solution for our DevOps model, which is very useful. Data privatization (GDPR enable), synthetic test data generation, and test data provisioning are its main interesting features.

On-time production and real time data for DevOps testing environment and CI/CD pipeline.

Data privatization, provisioning, and generation for DevOps and CI/CD pipeline. 

• More features on Big Data environment data privatization. 
• Synthetic data generation on domain specific. 
• SAP test data generation for SAP testing.

Broadcom TDM's best feature is the self-service portal.

Broadcom TDM takes a long time to import documents, which wastes time that could be spent on other things. It also hasn't evolved much in the last ten years. In the next release, Broadcom should add more mining, search, and variable capabilities.

I've been using Broadcom TDM for eight to nine years.

Broadcom TDM is stable.

Broadcom TDM is scalable.

The initial setup was challenging, and I would rate it 1.5 out of 5.

An ROI is easily achievable with Broadcom TDM and can be achieved in two-and-a-half years. I would rate the ROI as four out of five.

I would rate Broadcom TDM's pricing as four out of five.

I would give Broadcom TDM a rating of eight out of ten.

The most valuable features for us are masking, data profiling, and creating data subsets. More specifically, we are able to assist our clients with data privacy and the regulatory recommendations that come from the government. We help them to comply with PI, IP, HI and PCI regulations.

CA Test Data Manager is enormously helpful to us. We assist our customers by speeding up the application development process using real-time test data and synthetic test data, which mimics the real test data.

Integration

CA Test Data Manager is pretty stable, but integration is where we are looking for some improvements.

It is fairly scalable for the implementations I've participated in. We haven't yet utilized the current available capacity.

I would give technical support 8/10. Generally, we get a solution to an issue, but we have to go through multiple iterations before we get a complete resolution.

Previous to implementing Test Data Manager all our work was done manually. We used custom SQL scripts, but because of ICD regulatory recommendations, we switched to Test Data Manager.

Initial setup was complex in comparison to other solutions for which we did proof-of-concept. There are a lot of contact points with the TDM suite, which I personally felt increased the complexity.

We evaluated Delphix and IBM, as well as CA Test Data Manager. One of the reasons we chose CA, aside from the fact that we are CA partners, is due to support for PCI and PHI in terms of faster test data generation. The biggest differentiation was in generating test cases from the data. CA implemented this for test matching and then integrated it with Agile Requirements Designer. That tipped the scales in favor of CA TDM.

When choosing a vendor, we look for continuous innovation and continued support. Continuous innovation can release features into the market ahead of other vendors. So that's something we always look for.

My recommendation is to perform a detailed evaluation. If only simple, straightforward, and small-scale test data management is needed, I don’t think a large solution such as CA TDM is necessary. To justify the cost of CA TDM, you need to have need for large-scale test data management.