Fortune 500 Insurance Company
Implements K2tdm to Replace In-House
Test Data Management Tools

Snapshot (Sep 30, 2023)

$   1 - 2 trillion in revenues
$ 20-30 billion in claims/benefits
80-100 million clients

With our own tools, we were spending a lot of time manually looking through front-end source systems for the appropriate test data.
With K2tdm, we now access test data quickly and easily, without having
to know which database, table, or field it comes from.

Vice President

Enterprise Quality Engineering

The business impact of K2tdm

After implementing the K2view test data management solution,
the insurance giant achieved a:

60%

increase in bug detection early in the SDLC

70%

cost reduction for test data provisioning

100%

increase in time-to-value of software releases

Considered 1 of the 100 most sustainable corporations in the world, this global insurance company provides a broad range of insurance, investment, and wealth management services to individuals, businesses, and institutions. Its 50,000+ employees and 90,000+ advisors serve 80+ million private and corporate clients worldwide.

Over the years, the insurance company amassed several different legacy and home-grown test data management tools, spread out across different business units, spanning different states, countries, and continents. Test data generation was slow, not scalable, and manually run by a small platform team serving test data to over 600 testers globally. Additionally, due to the mix of different tools, any centralized functions – like reusing test datasets – were out of the question.

Further, due to cost and complexity issues, the test data was only refreshed once a year. Test data management best practices call for refreshing data more regularly, since stale and outdated test data limits testing scenarios and impacts testing quality.

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Key Challenges

The company, which wanted to replace its legacy solutions with a single, centralized, cross-company test data management tool, defined a set of requirements, including the need to:

  • Deliver test data on demand
    The company wanted the test data to be delivered to QA teams across the company in minutes, instead of the days and weeks it had become used to.

  • Have testers provision data themselves
    An important capability was to enable testers to generate test data on-demand via a codeless platform, without the need for any IT intervention.

  • Reduce costs and resources
    There was a clearly defined need to reduce the number of full-time employees (FTEs) involved in the test data creation and delivery processes

  • Prevent test data override
    Different testers using the same test data were overriding each other, causing material delays from rework.

To address these challenges, the insurance company issued a detailed Request for Proposal (RFP) to the top test data management solution providers. After covering dozens of complex use cases in a requested Proof of Concept (POC), the firm ultimately subscribed to an enterprise-wide global license with K2view.

Key Goals

K2view was chosen because it addressed these challenges one by one, with its:

  • Business entity approach, which was immediately adopted with the creation of 3 business entities – Consumers, Contracts, and Advisors

  • Intelligent data subsetting, by relationship (for example, all Consumers managed by a single Advisor) – or by dozens of different parameters

  • Connectivity to company data sources, including IBM DB2/IMS, Oracle, and Salesforce

  • Self-service GUI, supporting all test data operations

  • No code tools, for data integration and transformation

  • Test data reservation, versioning, and rollback, across all business entities

  • Fluid data hydration, or the ability to easily move data to/from any environment

  • Integration with DevOps and CI/CD pipelines, for enhanced test data automation

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Results

The insurance company replaced all its legacy test data management tools with a single solution, K2tdm, and then built a competency center and a dedicated training environment to support its hundreds of testers. The benefits were quick to follow, namely a:

  • 60% increase in defect detection early in the SDLC – by shifting testing to the left

  • 70% cost reduction for test data provisioning overall – not including hardware

  • 100% increase in time-to-value of software releases – due to faster, higher quality test data

The rapid global rollout of K2tdm has led the insurance giant to investigate other data initiatives deployable on top of the same K2view Data Product Platform, such as synthetic data generation tools  (built into K2tdm), and a customer 360 platform.

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