Services

Test Environment Audit

We have worked with numerous clients, including: stock exchanges, investment banks, brokerage houses, etc. We’ve worked with them either directly or indirectly, testing their matching engines, surveillance systems, market operations and reporting, trading and market data gateways, post trade systems, connectivity with their clients, etc.

As a result, we have an excellent level of understanding of the financial and trading businesses and of the functional and technical challenges they experience, particularly with regards to their testing requirements. We have also developed a set of proprietary testing tools specifically designed for various testing types: functional testing on a protocol level, performance and capacity testing, failover and recovery testing.

Normally, when we are engaged on a project, we begin with a comprehensive Test Environment Audit.

During this audit, we analyze all the aspects of the existing QA and testing processes and artifacts such as:

  • Test environments, their limitations and differences from the production environment (which could be both the test environment that the Exchange IT organization uses for testing of new features and changes and/or the test environment that the Exchange provides to its clients for testing connectivity with their OMSs)
  • Test methodology in use, including test tools
  • QA processes and procedures
  • Test automation approach and current level
  • Past production bugs to see whether they were due to an incomplete test environment or test coverage gaps

Along with the audit report we work on an improvement strategy that includes such things as:

  • Suggestions on how the test environment could be improved
  • Introduce and provide stubs or data players that would complete the test environment
  • Enhance the existing test scripts with test cases that can now be executed in the new test environment
  • Create test environment health checks – a set of automated tests that are executed before testing starts and aim to verify that the environment is healthy and up and running. Upon completion of the health checks an automated email notification is sent to all parties involved in testing
  • Past production bugs to see whether they were due to an incomplete test environment or test coverage gaps

After the audit, if the client accepts the analysis and strategy, we then produce a detailed implementation plan.