Product Instrumentation
As we undertake the continual improvement of our application we will soon be auto-enabling a feature to capture additional information about your use of our products to improve and deliver more benefits to our customers:
- Proactive issue identification and collation of common customer issues to automatically calculate incident priority
- Remote resolution of test failures due to product issues
- Reduce the frequency and size of local Automation installation
- Deliver product improvements by understanding the most frequently used features and how they are used.
- Deliver additional product features on demand, and access to pilot or beta features without new product installation
To continue delivering these benefits, we may start to capture the following data from our next Provar Automation Release (v2.10.2 onwards) by default and will communicate this in advance. You will have the option to disable the collection of this data. The data we will be collecting, in addition to the data we collect today for license enforcement, is limited to the following new items:
Please note that while currently disabled, this feature is already available to use today. We are limiting this to a closed internal pilot with this Automation v2.10.1 release. You can choose to individually opt into this pilot programme by contacting your Provar Success Manager.
If you are concerned about this change and wish to speak to us before this feature is enabled by default in our Winter ‘24 Release on August 25th 2023 please contact us so we can discuss further. We will also be holding a Q&A Webinar and Office Hour for you to raise any concerns you may have. In the meantime, see below some potential questions and answers:
Will Provar be increasing the data you collect in the future?
Yes, it’s possible we will want to gather additional data about your use of our products, but we will communicate this in advance and consult with our customers before doing so with time to review the changes before they are enforced.
Are you collecting any PII data?
No, we are not collecting additional PII data. Note that users’ external IP Address data is already collected by us for licensing purposes. Depending on your specific InfoSec policy IP this could be deemed PII but is required to validate access. We handle this data according to our own InfoSec policy and ISO27001 certification, the same way as we hold your contact details in our own CRM. We cannot link individual contact details with an IP address or hostname.
Are you collecting any of my company data from my test cases?
No, we’re only collecting use of our product data. The only exception will be system-generated unique identifiers to help us identify the order of execution and compare different test runs against one another. None of your test steps names, data values, connection names, encryption keys or screenshots are captured unless you choose to share them with us for support purposes.
Can we disable the collection of this data?
Yes, you can disable the collection of this data via a feature flag.
Does this feature flag sit in the Provar.ini file?
Yes, currently this feature is controlled by the Provar.ini file. If the feature flag is not present, or is set to disabled, then no data is sent. Before releasing to general availability we will make sure this setting can be disabled at a Project level so that you do not need to keep switching it off with every Provar release. We are open to discussion if this should also be overridable at an Environment level.
Will this slow down my test case execution?
No, we have designed this to run asynchronously and not to retry sending data. If our data collector is unavailable and cannot be reached there is no impact to you.
Can I get access to the data you are collecting?
Yes, under data protection rules for your geographic region we will share any data collected while retained on request within the local rules for responding to requests, but only for your license keys and after proof of identity plus approval from your commercial stakeholder.
How long will you hold this data for and where is it stored?
We are updating our InfoSec policies and will make them available to explain how long we hold this data and the purpose we use it for. In general, we will be aggregating data on a rolling basis and archiving individual records within 180 days, or less. We are holding this data in our own AWS infrastructure and access is limited to authorized Provar employees in Product, Engineering, and Customer Service teams to perform their duties as needed.