Why FIX Session Testing is so crucial for a Trading Infrastructure

In today’s critical and regulation-based trading scenarios, the best implementation of FIX testing is required to meet regulatory requirements and to create an optimum risk averting environment at the lowest operational cost.

Over the period, trading operations are converted into complex grids of various multiple applications with diversified technologies coerced into an inclusive trading infrastructure. Testing has evolved with cluttered and varied deployments, which made the firms lack an overall ‘enterprise’ perspective, instead of depending on a multitude of different testing scenarios.

Automating the expensive and error-prone process of manually testing trading systems will reduce the dependencies on counterparty test environments, and It enables trading firms to quickly simulate trade scenarios, which impacts the firms to realize the trading system’s reliability and efficiencies before going live with complex environments.

Testing should be deployed from client mode for complete connectivity, functional and performance testing system should run from interactive GUI mode.

A positive and negative use-case scenario of buy-side, sell-side, venues and intermediaries will be tested, and It can be widely used during all stages of the System Development Life Cycle to assist developers during unit testing, quality assurance (QA) testing, certification, and post-deployment maintenance.

Enabling the seamless infrastructure validation will lead the system to much better and efficient scenarios, which are the basis for implementing best practices and it includes,

• A comprehensive, accessible view of deployment, management, results, and reports.
• Real-time view of testing progress through dashboards.
• The complete enterprise testing deployment will be consolidated. Previous test case results will be stored and analyzed.

Firms without best test case strategies will either pay a hefty fine or hit with huge trading loss and reputational risks if their trading system breaks down. Infrastructure validation helps to automate the expensive and error-prone manually testing, which reduces dependencies on counterparty test environments. The industry standard for comprehensive FIX testing offers an enterprise level approach to validate the complete trading infrastructure to meet today’s complex testing. Testing and deployment need to be part of a trading strategy and the solutions to execute low latency trading.

What’s required is the ability to maintain and test on an organization’s scale; to create an error-free infrastructure while reducing the cost and improving the operational efficiency.