Patterson Dental, a division of Patterson Companies (NASDAQ: PDCO), a global organization with 7,600 employees, required high-quality, de-identified, production-like data to utilize for performance and functional testing for its dental provider platforms. The company’s goals included evaluating whether its systems could manage real-world scenarios, identify performance bottlenecks, and reproduce and debug production issues in test environments. By incorporating Tonic Structural into its test data pipeline, Patterson Dental delivered automation, improved debugging efficiency, and enabled its team to focus on delivering a faster, more reliable product for users—all while striving to ensure protected health information (PHI) remained securely out of developer workflows.
The challenge: manual, slow, and inflexible test data
Performance testing is crucial for ensuring that software systems can handle real-world usage scenarios, identifying under load or delivering subpar user experiences. Patterson Dental sought to enhance its existing performance testing efforts through its work with Tonic.ai.
Manually pulling and preparing production data for lower environments is a slow and time-consuming, typically taking multiple hours per dataset and introducing inefficiencies and challenges scaling performance testing practices.
Additionally, reproducing production issues adds complexity and potentially impacts replication of scenarios in test environments. As Debarati Mukhopadhyay, Principal Performance Engineer at Patterson Dental, described, “It can be difficult to mimic complex situations in lower environments, but it is a critical need to effectively and promptly fix bugs.”
Patterson Dental wanted to “leverage production issues in our test environments to help address demand and effectively reproduce production issues in our test environments,” Mukhopadhyay explained.
Quality test data—realistic, production-like data that mimics actual user scenarios—is essential for ensuring that systems perform reliably under load, meet compliance standards, and deliver a seamless user experience. Partnering with Tonic.ai enabled Patterson Dental to generate quality test data and scale performance testing, thereby improving software delivery.
Patterson Dental was impressed by Tonic Structural’s ability to generate realistic, de-identified test data at scale while meeting strict compliance requirements. Tonic.ai’s reputation for reliability and ease of use made it a clear choice to address challenges and streamline workflows.
The solution: high-fidelity, de-identified data from Tonic Structural
Tonic Structural provides Patterson Dental with a comprehensive solution to generate de-identified, production-like test data quickly, securely, and at scale. Through automation, Structural enabled Patterson to meet HIPAA compliance standards and deliver high-quality data for performance and functional testing.
The ability to successfully address HIPAA compliance standards through this work was non-negotiable for Patterson. As a company handling sensitive Protected Health Information (PHI), striving to ensure the security and privacy of data was critical—not just for regulatory adherence, but to safeguard the trust of their customers and partners. With Tonic Structural, Patterson Dental could generate realistic, de-identified data that met these stringent standards, and allow their team to efficiently reproduce and fix production bugs in lower environments.
Tonic Structural also was able to develop complex database solutions for data migration needs for the company through a custom key mapping generator that seamlessly manages data relationships during migration.
“The Tonic team has been incredibly supportive. Their ability to deliver a custom feature tailored to our needs was pivotal to our success,” shared Mukhopadhyay.
The combination of Tonic Structural’s comprehensive platform, the custom key mapping generator, and the support of the Tonic.ai team has been transformative for Patterson. These solutions empowered their teams to scale operations, improve efficiency, and deliver higher-quality testing outcomes. The custom key mapping generator, in particular, proved to be a game-changer, enabling Patterson Dental to streamline workflows and meet the growing demands of their business.
The results: faster, scalable, and more efficient testing
With Tonic Structural, the company achieved immediate and measurable improvements in their testing workflows, reducing test data generation time by 75% and cutting it down from 2.5 hours to just 35 minutes. Additionally, Patterson Dental was able to significantly expand its performance testing framework for dental practices, increasing the capacity from testing a single practice and its complexities per day to testing between 15 and 25 practices daily. Structural enables up to seven development teams across Patterson Dental to access realistic, de-identified test data securely and rapidly for both performance and functional testing.
The impact of these improvements is evident in the company’s ability to quickly reproduce and resolve production issues today. One significant example involved a performance issue that Patterson Dental was able to recreate in a lower environment and implement a solution. Mukhopadhyay said, “We easily reproduced the performance issue with that practice... fixed it and patched it to production.” By integrating Structural into their workflows, Patterson Dental’s team can take on more complex development challenges, enhance performance testing framework, and scale operations with confidence.
Looking ahead, Patterson Dental is excited to build on the successes achieved with Tonic Structural. The team is particularly enthusiastic about new features, such as algorithms that intelligently suggest generators based on column similarity, which further streamline data protection workflows. By enabling the teams to work faster, smarter, and with greater flexibility, Tonic.ai has become a cornerstone of Patterson Dental’s testing strategy—laying the foundation for continued innovation and growth.
“We are taking on more challenges because data generation efficiencies have been realized. Leadership is recognizing the impact, and it is exciting to see what is next,” concluded Mukhopadhyay.
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