A Euro-zone central bank

SkySparc provided comprehensive third party quality assurance services to a leading euro central bank during their 7.4 upgrade project

Challenges

When this central bank upgraded to Wallstreet Suite v 7.4 from an earlier version of the software, the extent of change involved required, effectively, a re-implementation.

Because SkySparc has in-depth experience of working with both versions of the software our client turned to us for quality assurance advice and execution assistance for the safe and efficient migration of data from the old, legacy system to the new environment.

The requirement included a solution for thorough and effective testing of all migrated data – up to User Acceptance Testing level.

We had also worked with this client before, providing a successful, automated solution for their risk management reporting requirements.

Solution

We worked closely with our client, and drew on our extensive experience, to develop the migration approach, detailing the content to be migrated and the process and sequence for achieving this.

The first task was to reconcile the static data (for example, counterparty details, account details, etc.) in the new system with the legacy data, using the automated testing capability of our OmniFi software.

OmniFi automatically fetches/loads specified data to and from the system. The data can then be automatically compared and reconciled with other data sets, integrated with other systems or output in specified formats for management reporting. This powerful functionality allows large quantities of data to be extracted, matched, tested or used to create specific solutions with speed and accuracy. OmniFi automates processing, reduces manual work and dramatically improves process consistency – so reducing operational risk and improving the quality of multiple processes.

The next step in the project was to test and reconcile test transactions created by designated business users. Once again, we used OmniFi for this.

According to our client: “SkySparc’s knowledge and experience of the core software, and of quality assurance requirements, has been critical to ensuring thorough, third-party, best-practice testing. Automating the testing using OmniFi has also ensured accurate, consistent and high quality results,”

The testing process created is now also available for our client to use again in future changes and upgrades. Finally, SkySparc prepared and tested all the scripts needed to automatically load the positions and transactions into the new production system during the go-live for the re-implementation.

SkySparc consultants were very proactive and focused on problem solving. They communicated transparently, which really helped us making decisions on how to deal with problems.

Migration Manager at the bank

Results

Our client has a fully documented and quality assured solution for static and transaction data in time for the upgrade go-live.

Automating the testing allowed more test cases to be included, improving the thoroughness of the testing and the quality of the overall data migration. This thorough approach to migration and migration testing fulfilled one of the key project objectives, the elimination of reputation risk.