PopulAid: In-Memory Test Data Generation

During software development, it is often necessary to access real customer data in order to validate requirements and performance thoroughly. However, company and legal policies often restrict access to such sensitive information. Without real data, developers have to either create their own customized test data manually or rely on standardized benchmarks. While the first tends to lack scalability and edge cases, the latter solves these issues but cannot reflect the productive data distributions of a company. In this paper, we propose PopulAid as a tool that allows developers to create customized benchmarks. We offer a convenient data generator that incorporates specific characteristics of real-world applications to generate synthetic data. So, companies have no need to reveal sensible data but yet developers have access to important development artifacts. We demonstrate our approach by generating a customized test set with medical information for developing SAP’s healthcare solution.