Human Capital Golden Data Test Set

An enduring challenge in the Federal IT ecosystem is testing potential new products with relevant “real-world” data prior to a costly acquisition action without infringing upon numerous security requirements, Privacy Act laws, regulations or policies. Programs have spent significant time and money granting Authority to Operate (ATO) for non-production systems to test de-identified data with a prospective software vendor. A corollary challenge arises when proposing and/or testing interfaces between existing systems that cross Agency or Departmental boundaries.

Thus, the transactional purpose of the Golden Data Test Set (GDTS) is to provide a set of realistic, non-PII, fictitious employee profiles and test scenarios to test human resource (HR), time and attendance, and payroll systems for pay calculation accuracy and alignment to pay-impacting standards as published by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Human Resources Line-of-Business (HRLoB). The GDTS helps to:

• Reduce risk by offering pre-acquisition test data,
• Save labor hours in testing,
• Alleviate security and privacy concerns in test data, and
• Foster a standards-compliant ecosystem that enhances interoperability, accuracy, and efficiency of integration.

Note: The GDTS is in the public domain and there are no restrictions on the use of the data test set.

April, 2022: The guide and files have been restructured to provide additional clarity, correct some minor quality assurance items, add a file to reflect some non-noa related actions separately (Pay_PP4_v1.1), and one transaction was split into a different XML file to make it clear to apply them in the correct order (HR_TRANS_RETRO_20210214_v1.1).

For questions, please contact newpayteam@gsa.gov.