How generative AI brings synthetic data to software engineering By Wim Blommaert

Synthetic (fake) images made by generative AI have been used in the medical world to train tumor detection software for many years now. Recently it has also become possible to generate synthetic tabular data, which makes up the bulk of the data in a bank like ING. In software Engineering testing is a very important activity but its only as good as the available test data. The automatic generation of synthetic tabular test data can help engineers so they can focus on the code. At ING we started the journey to use Generative AI to create Synthetic tabular data more than 2 years ago. I’m running a dedicated team that has already connected 11 applications to synthetic data and starts the scaling of this technology cross the bank. I will use a few examples of real projects to showcase what this is going to do for SoftwareEngineering. In one such project we are now able to generate 10k synthetic payments (SEPA) in less than 1 minute which manually took days to just create a few. In another one we generated thousands of synthetic request / reply json pairs which we then use to mock REST API’s. Or we produced a huge dataset for performance testing and shared it with an external party. We are also looking into the integration of this technology into Azure deployment pipelines in support of test automation. Based on the rich experience we already have at ING this will be a very hands on look into how engineers can benefit from this new technology. WIM BLOMMAERT Wim Blommaert has a master’s degree in computer science and Mathematics He worked in the IT departments of banks, ran his own business in test consultancy and worked as a test consultant for many years covering many different branches of the economy. On occasion he lectures at Belgian universities, and he has been involved in running incubators for FinTech’s. Wim has a wide interest covering such things as software testing , mathematics , quantum physics , quantum computing and military history. Since a few years Wim turned his attention to the automatic generation of synthetic data for the purpose of software testing, data analytics and sharing data in a safe way with 3rd parties. He is now leading a team at ING that is overseeing the roll out of this technology cross ING bank.