8 - Testing a Derivatives Trading System in an Uncooperative Environment

Summary

SYNOPSIS

This case study describes a project where our team was contracted to assist the resolution of quality issues in a commercially critical derivatives trading system and the challenges imposed by the demanding development environment in a financial institution.

After reviewing the testing requirements, the timescales and budget, and the difficult nature of the development environment, an agile testing approach was selected. This case study covers the selection process for the use of and the results obtained from using an agile approach.

Introduction

My name is Nick Denning and at the time of this case study I was the managing director of Strategic Thought Limited, a company I founded in 1987, which we subsequently floated on AIM in 2005 and which now specializes in the development and sale of financial risk management products. At the time the events in this case study took place, we were an IT consultancy with a strong reputation for work in the Ingres Relational Database Management System arena. A particular strength of ours was to be able to analyze systems, identify performance issues, and make changes to the database configuration, the database structures, and the SQL code within the application.

Making changes to mission-critical applications, sometimes directly on the production environment, required a careful consideration of the implications for a change, and the ability to assess the risks and agree with a customer on the risk reward profile to justify implementing changes that bypassed the conventional release procedures.