Products

Back-End System Tester (BEST)

BEST is a unique and powerful tool for delivering performance testing and functional test automation solutions for financial applications. BEST is used for accelerated development of custom test harnesses around complex distributed applications. Those harnesses can support any activity that requires pre-recorded/controlled/synchronized input for trading back ends, such as OMS/DMA or algorithmic trading systems.

BEST supports many industry standard and custom financial protocols, and is constantly being expanded to add new ones.

BEST‘s expandable architecture also allows adding specialized tools. As an example, the unique BEST Exchange Simulator add-on can be used to test non-deterministic algo trading or SOR solutions. A special library is also available for testing Siebel CRM implementations.

 

BEST Features

  • DMA/OMS testing
  • Support of industry standard connectivity, including but not limited to:
  • FIX 4.0 – 5.0
  • FAST
  • Reuters RMDS (SSL, Tibco)
  • Fidessa OpenAccess
  • North America Exchanges connectivity and market data
  • Full functional Exchange Emulators for several European/US exchanges ( information upon request )
  • Trading phases, market data emulation
  • Order book emulation

 

Siebel CRM testing

  • BEST parses Siebel Web Protocol, allowing direct communication with Siebel Web Server
  • Supports Siebel 7.5 and Siebel 7.8 technology
  • Allows working with logical representation of Siebel domain objects
  • Custom UI representing communication to Siebel from end user perspective

 

Connectivity

  • Client emulation: BEST emulates client network connections representing real users or connected subsystems
  • Server Emulation: BEST emulates network severs accepting connections from any applications inside system under the test
  • Network monitoring: BEST dynamically monitors network connections using BEST proxy utility. BEST is also capable of reading server logs and monitoring industry standard Application/RDBMS servers
  • Remote environment management
  • Ability to run test scripts against different environments
  • Abstraction of specific protocols
  • Support of TCP/IP, UDP, Multicast
  • Support of HTTP/HTTPS
  • Support of Web Services and SOA

 

Test scripts development

  • Full support of J2SE 1.5 or higher
  • IDE with Intellisense, syntax highlighting, runtime reporting and debugging
  • BEST does not require Java development skills to start test scripts development
  • A number of wizards and tutorials for different types of test scripts
  • Flexible reporting subsystem allowing report generation in HTML, PDF, MS Word and MS Excel formats
  • Ability to execute test scripts either in IDE or in shell
  • BEST is suitable for splitting test library into reusable Test Framework and specific test scripts

 

Functional Testing

  • Ability to develop test scenarios consisting of test cases
  • Ability to record real environment behavior and create test actions basing on such recording
  • Ability to articulate test cases as sets of actions described in Excel spreadsheets. Such script can be reviewed and maintained by business users and analysts
  • Ability to control whole environment from single script
  • Initiate virtual client connections
  • Manage or completely substitute server emulators
  • Manipulate environment remotely through UI or SSH
  • Integrated with industry standard UI test automation utilities SilkTest and QTP

 

Performance Testing

  • Ability to record virtual users behavior
  • Ability to emulate load caused be number of different virtual users hitting system simultaneously
  • Ability to pump prerecorded message flow into several network connections. The connections could be either client or server
  • Server emulators are capable of working in fast mode processing high volume of incoming requests
  • Reporting subsystem allows processing network/server logs to measure throughput and capacity system under the test or any part of it
  • Network pump approach can be combined with virtual users approach it single script

 

Configuration and Customization

  • BEST is a great platform for building suitable Test Harnesses around server back-ends. This requires configuration and customization for specific backend. Allied Testing provides consulting services for building Test Harnesses around different client applications and implementing test automation and performance testing
  • Our average productivity for configuration/customization is
    • 2 – 4 m/w (usually onsite) to research system under the test
    • 4 – 8 m/w to implement custom connection and protocol
    • Several man days to install and configure our software
    • Several man month to develop Test Framework/Test Library

 

Note: These estimates are highly dependent on system complexity and actual testing scope/goals.

 

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