Client Simulator

Simulate Your Client’s Incoming FIX Order Flow for Fast
and Thorough Testing of Your Trading System
Your trading system must be thoroughly tested to ensure smooth acceptance of inbound order flow from clients. Accommodating your clients and accepting their order flow is critical to your firm’s success. An optimal testing environment would allow you to simulate any buy-side order flow and comprehensively test your trading software without the inconvenience of having to directly test with your clients. Now, the Aegis Client Simulator allows sell-side firms, ECNs and exchanges to do just that.

What Does It Do?
Client Simulator acts as a fully-featured simulation of your buy-side clients for the purpose of testing their inbound equities, options, fixed income, and futures FIX order flow against your trading system. Client Simulator aids in reducing development and QA cycles so that you can prepare your system faster and deliver software of the highest quality. It is an invaluable tool for development, quality assurance and production support.

Interactive Testing
Its user-friendly interface allows developers and testers to enter orders, status requests, cancel/replace requests, and other trading scenarios. Multiple asset classes and messages are supported, including:

Once entered, they appear in an easy-to-read blotter. In the trace window, the Simulator’s messages are associated with corresponding responses returned from your trading system or exchange. All messages can be viewed in a decoded form in the message detail window. The logical organization of messages makes it easy for the user to generate, gather and organize all information related to order flow.

Multi Line FIX Connection
Client Simulator can connect over multiple lines to counter parties, using FIX 4.0 - FIX 4.4. Messages can be sent round-robin across multiple lines, or limited to one line at a time.

“Record & Playback” for Complex Scenario Testing
Once a user has sent order flow to the trading system under test, Client Simulator can record the messages to a file for future playback. When a similar test is needed, the user simply starts the saved scenario, driving the trading system to generate FIX responses. Further, a “Smart Replay” feature handles all ID and date fields when resending and verifying FIX messages, allowing the user to concentrate on business level fields.

Debug Production Failures
Client Simulator allows you to import production data and selectively replay the information to reproduce, isolate and debug production failures in your FIX engine or trading system. By simultaneously feeding production data into both the Simulator and your trading system, a realistic reconstruction of production scenarios and failures can be achieved.

FIX Validation Testing
Client Simulator allows you to validate all FIX traffic (in and out) against the version of FIX you’re using (from 4.0-4.4). Validation can detect required fields that are missing, invalid fields, and invalid values for fields. Users can customize validation, to include custom fields used by clients.

Performance Testing
The replay of orders can be automated to repetitively enter the system at specified intervals and frequencies, a helpful feature when you want to simulate how your trading system operates and responds during peak trading. Client Simulator can streamline the sending of messages to achieve over 5000 messages/sec throughput. When running a performance test, Client Simulator provides running statistics to measure the response of your system.

Regression Testing
Client Simulator can be used to create an automated regression test system for FIX protocol traffic. Via a simple spreadsheet format, or a trace file, the Simulator will accept order entry parameters for input, with a corresponding set of verification criteria to be validated on output. This allows an OMS to be inundated with many permutations of FIX traffic, with the results automatically verified. Well-thought-out test scenarios can be assembled into a comprehensive regression test suite to ensure future system releases do not regress (by reintroduction of previously solved problems), and that they are thoroughly tested and reliable. Smart Replay ensures verification solely on business logic, and not on verbatim values of ID fields.

Automation
Client Simulator can be run with command line parameters that allow for automation of all its testing features. This can be scheduled as part of a general automated regression test procedure. Client Simulator can also be integrated into a larger automation system, using a remote command port to control the Client Simulator’s actions.

Extensibility
Client Simulator allows the user to extend its functionality and customize to the specific testing needs. Custom Tags allow a user to define any tag to be sent with any message type. Values can be a string, an auto increment counters, or even a dynamic date/time value. Free Form allows a user to send any FIX message, and even override FIX protocol fields, to test any FIX scenario. Smart Replay can be customized to account for any tags, as IDs, date/time, or to process possible values from a file.

Benefits

• Reduces development costs by providing an easy-to-use platform that is always available to your developers.
• Reduces testing costs by curtailing expensive, error-prone manual testing.
• Improves the quality of your trading system by enabling more creative and comprehensive QA testing to detect and solve defects early on, and by supporting automatic regression and load testing.
• Reduces time to correct errors by enabling you to replay hard-to-reproduce problems.
  

In Summary
Our goal at Aegis is to provide testing solutions that are thorough, fast, simple, repeatable, and always available. Client Simulator meets this goal by giving your QA and Support team a complete, continuous, live trading environment for testing FIX order flow from your clients.

Click here to request a product demo

Exchange Simulator

T3 Regression Test Suite