• Would you like your person to be of any particular age or gender?
• Would you like an address with that?
• How about an income and employment record?
• That will be eight clicks, thank you very much.

• You killed your person, you say? No worries, three clicks and you have yourself a clone.

Test data, or rather the quest for these, can steal time, ruin your day, and delay deploys. At the Norwegian Welfare and Labour Administration our teams need coherent data across a multitude of systems and test environments. Nobody can wait for days or weeks. We need thousands of people, of all sorts and with various backgrounds. And they all have to be synthetic, of course.

Therefore, we have built a tool for creating synthetic and coherent data on demand. When you have a working test data set, it can easily be recreated or cloned. Dolly, named after what might be the world’s most famous sheep, give the testers and developers test data without delays. On top of that it saves the tax payers vast sums.

In this talk I will explain the concept, how we create coherent and synthetic data across our many (legacy) systems, and how we work to improve our beloved Dolly. You may not be able to steal Dolly, but you may clone the idea.

Takeaways

How to make test data coherent across a multitude of systems?

How to cut time and cost of test data?

How to have a bit of fun whilst managing your test data?