Company Demonstrates Data Masking and Synthesis Jobs Inside CI/CD Workflows that Need Test Data.
Innovative Routines International, better known as IRI, The CoSort Company, has automated procedures for the creation and deployment of smart test data in Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) platforms used in software development operations (DevOps). Specifically, IRI shows how its FieldShield or DarkShield data masking software, and its RowGen data synthesis and subsetting package, can run from Amazon CodePipeline, AzureDevOps, GitLab, and Jenkins to produce the test data developers need in their DevOps workflows.
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In recent reporting on Test Data Automation, Bloor Research analyst Daniel Howard emphasized the use of automation holistically throughout software testing but warned of the inherent challenge of the test data delivery process: “There’s little point in having a slick testing process that automates everything from test design to test execution if you have to generate and feed in your test data manually every time you run it.”
To overcome this bottleneck, Howard recommends the integration of data masking and synthesis jobs to create and feed smart test data automatically into the software development lifecycle (SDLC), lest “your entire testing process come grinding to a halt with worrying regularity.” For this reason, IRI demonstrated how its FieldShield, DarkShield, and RowGen products – which are also TDM components of the IRI Voracity platform – can be called to feed test data into popular CICD pipelines on premise or in the cloud.
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In a series of articles in the IRI data management blog, lead software engineer Adam Lewis explains and demonstrates how IRI jobs might be called in different DevOps platforms. The examples show the use of:
- IRI RowGen to synthesize and IRI FieldShield to mask MySQL data in AWS for use in post-deployment testing from an S3 JSON bucket used for testing applications via GitLab;
- IRI DarkShield API calls to mask a MongoDB collection used in an AWS CodePipeline;
- IRI RowGen to synthesize test data in an Excel spreadsheet, and the DarkShield-Files API to mask PII in a CosmosDB NoSQL DB for testing in Azure Devops; and,
- IRI RowGen (Voracity) to subset and mask data located in Oracle DB via Jenkins, running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) VM.
According to IRI’s lead software development engineer on the project, Adam Lewis, “such procedures are designed to remove the difficulty and guesswork out of creating safe, realistic test data, and using that data exactly where and when it is needed.”
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