Sunday, December 27, 2009

Testing with FIX Protocol - BFSI Domain

Folks:

This is an interesting read. Keeping in mind that the many companies are trying to develop a level of competency to overall testing FIX protocol.

I had known that Capgemini has developed this with the help of Aegisoft and HP, but never knew that BreakingPoint Labs (http://www.breakingpointsystems.com/) has developed their own load testing tool, which will help to test the FIX Based applications.

Basics about FIX:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange

http://www.cameronedge.com/fixwiki/FIXwiki

http://www.fixprotocol.org/products/

What it is:

The Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol is an electronic communications protocol initiated in 1992 for international real-time exchange of information related to the securities transactions and markets. With trillions of dollars traded annually on the NASDAQ alone, financial service entities are investing heavily in optimizing electronic trading and employing Direct Market Access (DMA) to increase their speed to financial markets. Managing the delivery of trading applications and keeping latency low increasingly requires an understanding of the FIX protocol

Companies providing QA solutions around it:

Capgemini Announces Comprehensive FIX Protocol Testing Accelerator for Financial Services Industry

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS216595+07-May-2009+BW20090507

"The traditional approach would be to carry out the tests over the phone and using paper test scripts that would have to be updated," to reflect whether or not connectivity had been successfully established, said Murat Asku, practice head of testing for capital markets at Capgeminis's financial services business group. "Our approach involves updating digital models of tags and messages of all the major asset classes."

The Capgemini accelerator, developed in conjunction with Hewlett Packard, Blueprint Systems and Aegisoft, streamlines the updating process and stabilizes the changes being introduced. The way messages are tested and what they're tested against also are standardized, reducing strain on quality assurance and IT departments.

Capgemini Financial Dips Into FIX Testing Waters

http://www.securitiesindustry.com/issues/19_96/-23496-1.html

History teaches.....Fight to win!!

Madan Mohan Malaviya was trying to build a good university; he had to overcome many difficulties and barriers.
He worked with great determination to start the university. There was a funds crisis; but he did not get disheartened. He went from town to town, met many rich people and traders to collect donations.
He went to the Nizam of Hyderabad to request him for funds. The Nizam was furious, 'How dare You come to me for funds and that too for a Hindu University? He roared with anger and took off his footwear and flung it at Malviya.
Malviya picked up the footwear and left silently. He came directly to the market place and began to auction the footwear. As it was the Nizam's footwear, many came forward to buy it. The price went up.
When Nizam heard of this, he became uneasy. He thought it would be an insult if his footwear were to be bought by someone for a pittance. So he sent one of his attendants with the instruction, 'Buy that footwear no matter what the bidding price be!'

Thus, Malviya managed to sell the Nizam's own footwear to him, for a huge amount.
He used that money to build the Banaras Hindu University.
thus it's well said.....

"Himmate Mardaa Madad-e-khuda"

Indian Army launches its own webportal

TAKING A major step forward in an effort to empower itself into a technology driven environment, the Indian Army (IA) got its own web portal. The web portal is hosted on the National Informatics Centre (NIC) server and was launched on Thursday, November 5, 2009.

To know more click on below link

SOA Testing -

Found useful stuff at a Software Testing Google Group:

****************************************************************

When you say SOA testing there are many complexities are involved.

SOA testing is performed at different levels
1) Application Level
2) Web services Level
3) Integration Testing
4) Database Level

As the term SOA is explained as - Service Oriented Architecture, there
are different services which are consumed within the application on
shared platform.

Service Consumer and Service Provider are the main actors along with
the Service Registry.
Testers scope are varied as per the testing requirements.

Tester is responsible to validate the SOA rules(Service Registry
rules) as well as to ensure all different applications interacting
with each other are in sync.

Web services communication within different entities is critical part.
It is like Continuous Improvements/Enhancements of the application.

Here are some of the validations from QA's perspective:-
1) Business rules are being followed within the application
2) Request & Response communication is as per SOA policies
3) Appropriate fields are being updated in DB
4) If there are any 3rd party processes like Batch process is to be
executed then the result set shows its influence in respective
applications only
5) Same Business process is executed at different levels thru
different applications
6) All applications speaks same language in terms of communication and
core business processes
7) Data security testing is high priority
8) Factors influencing the configuration of web services
9) Integration Testing is also one of high priority issue
10)Continuous Regression is needed in order to keep SOA policies up to
date

At times the application may looks preety simple however, the factors
which drive the business rules are really complex.

There are possibilities that some of the applications using SOA
platform follow different development methodology like Agile,
Iterative or any other; which makes SOA testing an interesting case.

Most frequent defects are from all quarters where the application has
touched the common platform.
One can observe defects as listed in above 10 points and to add the
list are Environment Issues as well.

Any small defect in one application could be a potential showstopper
for another, which makes QA team very vital team player in continuous
improvement activities.

If there are any queries, please let me know, I would be more than
happy to address.

All the Best!

Regards,

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Good Books to Read

Like everyone else, I am also trying to read good and getting some inspiration from those ones:
1) My experiments with Truth - MK Gandhi - The best I have ever read
2) Celebrating Silence - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
3) Business of Freedom - Sandeep Singh(www.swastiks.blogspot.com)
http://indianoceanstrategy.com/services.php
4) Think and Grow Rich
5) The Magic of Thinking Big

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Win 7

As the Win 7 is hitting news with good and bad news, it is obvious that many technology reviewers will be putting it at their sites.

I am just sharing wit you what I found on a web site, a good overview about the way Win 7 is structured:

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Adoption of S Curve

http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/1999/11/paulk.asp

We must have read somewhere about S Curve, which explains that how technology is getting absorbed into the society.( This is true for almost for the any other kind of concept also:))

which have devived people into the following catergoies:

1) Innovators - Techies

2) Early Adopters - Visionaries

3) Early Majority - Pragmatists

4) Late Majority - Conservaties

5) Laggards - Skeptics

The following diagrams also similarly describes about how the testing services fit into this S Curve:

Social Colloboration

As was propaged by Web 2.0 that the world will eb lead bu Social colloboration, that has been surely cashed on by many companies who have just bec ome too big in just last 5 years like
YouTube, Orkut. Likedin.com, Twitter, MySpace.com, FaceBook, RSS etc. We can see that these kind of social networking sites are surely making lot bigger business than many other businesses. I feel that at this stage, we are right now just scratching the surface of the big pile of the power Web 2.0 As we slowly transition to the Web 3.0, you will find that smarter software will enable much after transition to the social networking
These thoughts are very randonm, but out them together in a more cohenrant passion as get more time

VISTA INDIA (Empowering Women)

Dear Ones,
Pitaji,our beloved Guruji's father, at the age of 86 has initiated and completed many projects to educate and empower many a village girl's child. He has now has identified 33 villages Sirsi village district of Karnataka, to give basic education in reading and writing, and empowering ladies by teaching them how to stitch, tailor clothes and helping them in selling their products. Pitaji is appealing one and all to come and help get machines to assist in this particular project. Each of these machines cost Rs. 3000. I would really appreciate it if you could be a part of this noble endeavour. Please let me know if you would like to do so. You can give your donation by cheques drawn on "VISTA INDIA". Please write your name and address at the back of the cheque and send it to us at:
Rajeev Chaudhary

C/OAban Batliwala F-303 Adarsh Residency, 47th Cross 8th Block,Jaynagar,

Bangalore Karnataka 560082

Performance testing of Flex Based Applications

Since the RIA applications has been overtaking the front end designs of most of the web sites, so comes our challenges of testing the application. I have few documents which I am sending you on Flex Load testing. Please share if you have anything in hand. Flex is one the implementation technologies in the RIA field by Adobe Systems. Flex embedded in the Flash Player has almost of the 90% of the market. The good news is that Adobe has made the documentation of protocol – RTMP public after keeping it a secretly guarded for many many years. Benchmarking Flash Player 10 (Updated)

http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/10/benchmarking-flash-player-10.ars

LR 9.5 now supports in the following protocols:
1. Adobe® Action Message Format (AMF v3)
2. Adobe® Real-time Messaging Protocol (RTMP)
3. Adobe® Flex 2 and Flex 3
4. Ajax

Another interesting document produced by RIA by Webload is as follows:www.radview.com/.../Load%20Testing%20Web%202.0%20Technologies%20%5BWhitepaper%5D.pdf

Basics about RTMP and AMF:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Messaging_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Message_Format http://www.richnetapps.com/category/flash-actionscript/

Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) is a proprietary protocol developed by Adobe Systems for streaming audio, video and data over the Internet, between a Flash player and a server.The RTMP protocol has three variations:The "plain" protocol which works on top of TCP and uses port number 1935RTMPT which is encapsulated within HTTP requests to traverse firewallsRTMPS which works just like RTMPT, but over a secure HTTPS connection.At a higher level, the RTMP encapsulates MP3 and Flash Video multimedia streams, and can make remote procedure calls (RPCs) using the Action Message Format.The RTMP defines several channels on which packets may be sent/received, and which operate independently of each other. For example, there is a channel dedicated for handling RPC requests and responses, a channel for video stream data, a channel for audio stream data, a channel for out-of-band control messages (fragment size negotiation, etc.), and so on. During a typical RTMP session, several channels may be active simultaneously at any given time. When RTMP data is packetized, a packet header is generated.Action Message Format or AMF is a binary format based loosely on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). It is used primarily to exchange data between an Adobe Flash application and a database, using a Remote Procedure Call.Each AMF message contains a body which holds the error or response, which will be expressed as an ActionScript Object.
If you are not able to make out much from the Adobe produced documents, then nothing to worry, even I also could not make out anythingJ

Innovation in IT service Companies

Folks:
I am going throuhg this artcile which mentions that Symphony services are innovation based company. When I read this line, I felt that they are almost like any other who are typical outsourcers, but keep on showing on their websites that websites are they promote innovation in their delivery model. After reading through their website, I can that model which is being delpoyed in promoting innovation internally is definitely lot more mature than most of he service companies. That is why they have succedded in their efforts:
"Like the majority of info-tech companies, Symphony Services emphasizes innovation, but its outcome-based business model really forces it to deliver the goods. In the past 18 months, clients have accepted 2,000 ideas—ranging from improving processes to creating IP—and implemented 500; 33 ideas have been patented"
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2009/08/_putting_your_m.html
This seems that this is definietly a way out for the services( technology) companies to come out of regular low value chain works and prove tehmsleves what like many other product companies hhave proved themselves.
Rupesh

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Life

Normally I do not have the urge to write so passinately, as I am having. May be teh cycel is that I am going through so many internal pressures. You never realise that things can change so damatically so much in your life; that life looks almost ups and down. Still I know that this is not end of life and we have to move on. Whether it is in terms of the career, family, personal likings etc. Every difficult step comes with an idea to make you more mature and ripe in life and I am sure that this will one of those chnages. This year of 2009 almost looks like year of 2006, in which I had seen so much turbulence in my life. The only difference I can narrate is that chnages in this year are brought by circumstances, while that year was led by me. There is soemthing like a feeling being fulfilled in life, which has almost disappeared these days and total anxiety has taken over; but surely makes me toil day and night tirelessly. I know that this road is long, I am surly going to sail through it.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Blogs on Agriculture Issues in India

Even though India is country whose more than 70% of the population is dependent on farming or farming related profession, but I have felt that the issues related to this sector are normally ignored or are being given very little attention by the mainstream media. Many newspaper have the terrible habit of mentioning that what happened to the various models in US/Europe, have no heart to mention that why thousands are farmers are committed suicide in last 10-15 years which is rarely seen in this country. I have known 2 people since last almost 10 years who have worked tirelessly and who have tried to bring their plight through mainstream media also.
Guess who?
They are P. Sainath and Devender Sharma
You are read more about their thoughts at
http://www.indiatogether.org/opinions/psainath/
http://devinder-sharma.blogspot.com/