Cinimex Test Tool

The information system of the modern enterprise quite often reminds a zoo – departments were automated by different products and applications at different times. However business processes are the phenomena end-to-end therefore sooner or later there is a question of creation of the unified integrated IT environment which basis often is the integration bus. There is a lot of technologies for integration, however any implementation requires frequent making changes and, as a result, repeated testing. Testing of integration solutions – the isolated problem area requiring special approaches, – Fokin Vyacheslav, the account director of Cinimex company considers.^[1]

As an example we will consider the main features of the standard project of implementation of an integration bus in bank. The set of the different systems using different formats of data interacts with it. Besides often there is no user interface: the bus communicates with the outside world, as a rule, by means of XML documents where as transport web services or the systems of message queues, such as IBM WebSphere MQ are used. When carrying out tests, of course, it is possible to manage only integration testing when the external systems having user interfaces are connected. But such approach is fraught with problems: errors in the integration solution will come to light at very late stages of implementation, practically at delivery of a product. Therefore it is desirable to resort to the help of autonomous testing at which the integration bus is tested in a separation from systems with which it should interact. Besides, in case of the complex integration project when the integration bus repeatedly is modified (error corrections, an exit of new release, etc.) not to do without the regression testing checking operability of a system after entering of changes into it. It is too unprofitable to perform such process manually as the speech often goes about several tens iterations of testing and formation of tens of thousands of documents. As a result not to do without automation. In the market there is a lot of solutions for the automated testing. However almost all of them have any shortcomings if it is about testing of integration platforms. In such situation the Russian integrators are forced to create own testing tools under certain tasks. At the same time the solution should be as rather universal to allow reuse in different projects, and highly specialized that the price of development remained reasonably.

In the spring of 2010 the Cinimex company started development of the Cinimex Test Tool tool. Being realistic about the forces and tasks, developers did not set as the purpose creation of a universal system of the automated testing. It was required to create compact tools for automation of autonomous testing of the bus – identification of errors in the bus only at a stage of integration testing of all systems manages too expensive for any project.

Product development was preceded by a research specialists of the company of different automation systems of testing in combinations and separately. The packet of requirements with which future automation system of testing of integration solutions had to satisfy was by results created, and then the software product is developed. Cinimex Test Tool is universal (interacts with several systems), works through WebSphere MQ, WebService Soap/HTTP, etc., provides monitoring of changes in databases, gives the chance of creation of own adapters to external systems. Process of creation of tests and the analysis of their results is user-friendly.

Cinimex Test Tool is already tested in practice. Testing of integration solutions with its help was held in Raiffeisenbank, Nordea Bank and also in one of the largest state banks. Cinimex Test Tool can provide both functional, and stress testing. Especially his developers attach importance of the tool to automation of regression testing of integration platforms. A system is offered as an independent product, and as a part of the complex projects including testing of integration solutions.