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Client Certification is a special kind of testing conducted to ensure the compatibility of automated trading systems connected to an exchange or a broker via financial industry protocols.
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Client certification is mandatory for any operator of an exchange or broker platform providing an opportunity to perform financial transactions
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Client certification has become a common practice in the financial industry Certification
Certification testing involves representatives of different organizations. Therefore the process requires a substantial amount of coordination and teamwork.
Let's go through some of the typical challenges that could be faced during client certification.
The existence of world time zones causes difficulties with planning and coordination of testing by teams of professionals physically located in various parts of the globe.
Certification can be required by several clients concurrently due to business or technical events, such as the deployment of new software, regulatory or technical requirements.
The Quality Assurance specialist conducting the certification must have an adequate level of technical and business knowledge.
Certification tests must be based on typical scenarios and produce meaningful results.
What Could Help Us To Solve These Problems?
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The creation of more optimal automated technological solutions for certification testing and the analysis of test results
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The usage of passive methods to analyze the success of the certification procedure, such as traffic capture of network connections or data from log files
In our opinion, the process of client certification can benefit from the inclusion of passive testing in it.
Passive testing is a software testing technique that observes the system without interaction.
A passive test tool does not affect the system under test and does not create additional message streams.
Meet Shsha!
Shsha is a passive post-transactional tool which:
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Supports various industry-standard and proprietary protocols
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Analyzes the clients' activity and forecasts the system response
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Parses and displays logs in a user-friendly way
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Parses the messages and then puts each into a database table where each column corresponds to a separate message field
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Can process massive amounts of heterogeneous clients connections data
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Allows making summarized reports, etc.
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Has an intuitive GUI
Shsha Operating Model
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Shsha captures all messages sent to the exchange by the client and vice versa, parses each message and puts the data into a relational database.
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By using SQL queries, the certifying organization's analyst can receive the statistics about the attempts to perform the steps in the test scenario and their success for every trading participant.
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Network packets data also allows finding additional problems, such as connectivity breaks or message buffering issues.
It's easy to plan and coordinate the testing process in different time zones having a passive tool which stores all the required information in the database and is accessible any time around the clock.
As a passive tool, Shsha does not affect the system under test and does not create additional message streams.
The trading participants can just connect to the test environment and send the orders listed in the provided test scenario. There's no need to install any additional software, collect logs, etc.
Shsha provides built-in groups of SQL scenarios covering all the client connectivity certification requirements issued by the trading coordinator for a number of exchange platforms.
