An industry leader providing end-to-end solutions to automate Foreign Exchange trading, our customer provides innovative solutions for financial institutions. Their flagship product, the online FOREX trader, connects to the various Trading Gateways across the world using Adapters. That is no small task. We’re talking millions of transactions at sub 200 ms response time.
When we were called to develop a automation suite for one its components, we didn’t expect anything challenging. Boy, were we in for a surprise or what?
An important middleware Component called as Adapter that links the FX Inside to the Provider. Different providers have their own Adapters. The real work of the Adapter was to direct a homogeneous data sent by the Client, while trading into heterogonous environment to provider and vice versa. These Adapters have to be tested for every release of the core applications. This is a backend non-UI programs that requires scripts to be written to test the functionality at API level.
The objective was to develop automation suite which can be used to test multiple adapters on both Simulator and Live setup. Automation suite should be flexible enough to cater to test new adapters that will be added in the future with minimal changes.
For that we interacted with the developers to understand the functionality of the Adapters and finally we developed a framework which would cater to automating multiple adapters and also add new adapters in the future.
The team started the incremental approach towards Automation of the Adapters by first interacting with the development and QA team, gathering the necessary information by which the common scenarios across the adapters were identified. The critical part of Automation was to develop scripts that can Automatically Restart the Adapters residing on a remote Linux box, send across trading messages to the adapter component, receive them by listening to messaging broker and parse the necessary information.
The result was much better than we anticipated. The execution time of the test scenarios for one Adapter taking two days earlier was reduced to thirty minutes for both live and Simulator environments, which was phenomenal for the client.
STAG developed a test suite to automate tests for every adapter at API level, thus, bringing down System testing effort by 40%.