Attra’s Chairman Mr. Anil Gammampila was one of the key speakers and panellist at the Cards & Payments, 2012. Mr. Anil Gammampila provided his expertise & insights on ‘Reducing the costs of services in payments’.

Attra’s Head of Testing Practice Mr. Krishnan Subramanian provided his expertise & insights on Potential Challenges in Test Automation for Cards Issuing.

About Attra

Attra is a leading IT solutions and services delivery provider with its focus dedicated helping the world’s leading companies in banking, finance and payments industry. Headquartered in Melbourne, Victoria (Australia), Attra addresses the changing needs of business with solutions that are flexible, cost-effective, quick to deploy and reliable. Attra’s team of over 500 professionals bring in unique expertise – a combination of state-of-art technology and domain knowledge. Attra is a preferred vendor and service provider to some of the major financial institutions and has a track record of delivering engagements of varying sizes successfully across geographies. Visit us at www.attra.com.au

If you are a tester, and even otherwise, it is easy to figure out that reusability has a direct relation and an inverse proportion to the Test Effort. We need to understand the need of reusability before implementing it. Though I will discuss, further down in this blog, specifics about reusability in testing projects, let’s first consider various aspects or needs of reusability.

Why Reuse?

Reusability is defined, in Wikipedia as ‘To use an item more than once’. This definitely means efficient use of existing knowledge, product or service being reused and minimize effort thereby leading to cost saving and maximize productivity and reliability since the item has already been used once.

Reuse can be thought of as opportunistic or planned. The former means that while getting ready for a project, the team realizes that there are existing components that they can reuse, while the latter emphasizes on strategically designing components so that they’ll be reusable in future projects.

Testing projects encompass both of the above mentioned approaches. I feel a mix of both works best, especially for the services industry.

Key features to consider?

If a company decides on building a reusable test suite for all the existing and future testing projects, following are the key features to be kept in mind, while choosing the mechanism to store the reusable test scripts,

1. Minimize manual effort
2. Ease of use
3. Time to search, retrieve and reuse the data
4. Maintenance effort of the application
5. Standardization to ensure maximum reuse with minimum effort
6. Secure and customized accesses
7. Usefulness to business in terms of reports and dashboards

What mechanism/tool to use to create a reusable testing repository?

Following are the options one can consider while choosing the mechanism to store the reusable test scripts,

1. Store the reusable scripts in excel based document(s). While this is an easy way of storing and retrieving data for simple searches, it provides limited security features, is manual in nature in terms of reusing the data
2. Store the reusable scripts in the standard test management tool that you use. The advantage of this approach is the ability to directly execute the test scripts thus saving time. The scripts can also be exported to excel when required. The disadvantages are limited means of customization and automation, slower response time of application, limited access to such application
3. Build an application with a database and GUI to store test scripts. This option provides maximum possibilities of customization in terms of searches, automation, user friendliness, and extensibility. But this would mean maintenance of the application and user training for the initial setup

How to create a reusable testing repository?

Whatever be the mechanism or tool used, the starting point of building any online reusable test suite is to identify the exhaustive list of functionalities and modularize them. This would help in categorizing the test scripts and in turn help in searching and reusing them. The standardization of naming conventions for each of the identified functionalities are very important in order to enable test scripts from different projects to reside in the same repository under different categories.

For existing projects, a one-time effort is needed to identify the reusable conditions and map them to the functions and sub-functions and finally repositorize them.

For new test project engagements, at the initiation phase, one should identify the scope of the project in terms of the functionalities to be tested (from the exhaustive list that exists as baseline) and then analyze the reusability of test scripts from available suite based on the functions identified.

What should a reusable testing repository enable/ensure?

Searchable: One should be able to easily search the available test scripts by performing a customised search based on various applicable parameters and then download the same in a usable format.

Security: One should also ensure that not everyone in the project should have the right to change the existing data in the suite, while the suite should be flexible to allow changes to be made when required by authorised people.

Revisiting the exhaustive list of functionalities: At the closure of each project, one needs to analyse if there were any newly built project specific test scripts or if a new functionality was tested (which did not exist in the baseline list) and add them to the reusable suite in generic or business specific category.

From a customer perspective, dashboards can be created to help them identify the existing coverage of functionalities and count of reusable test scripts at any given point of time. It provides a real time data to help in future ventures, estimations and helps gain confidence in the effectiveness of the reusability.

For a testing team, , the reusable repository helps in  depicting their existing experience in terms of test coverage and measure and pass on the benefits to the customer project after project.

Thus, building an online test suite repository is an iterative approach and makes a significant difference in testing effort thereby providing benefits both to the customer and the testing team.

During his address to staff of Attra the Minister highlighted the state of Victorian economy and also how the demographics of India and Australia are well placed to strengthen cooperation between both the nations.

A short Synopsis on PCI_DSS V 2.0

1. On December 15, 2004 the five major credit card companies – American Express, Discover, JCB, MasterCard, and Visa, collectively decided to form a neutral organization called the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council that created a set of requirements that needs to comply. This is a collaborative effort to achieve a common set of data security standards for use by entities that process, store or transport payment card holder data
2. PCI DSS, or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is created to increase controls and secure cardholder data, which is a set of requirements that must abide by when accepting any type of credit card information.
3. The PCI_DSS Standard applies the following entities :
   1. Acquirers and Issuers
   2. Merchants who are entitled to accept Card transactions
   3. Service Providers that provide any service requiring the processing, storing or transport of card information
4. PCI_DSS Council expects card holder data processors to comply with these set of requirements. These are assessed by Qualified Security Assessors (QSA) and Approved Scanning Vendors (ASV) and annual Certificate of Compliance (COC) is obtained.
5. The latest version – PCI_DSS V 2.0 – released  in October 2010 by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council

Attra has won a multi year contract to provide production and application support to a Fortune 10 Financial Institution that has credit cards operations across Europe, Americas, Australia and India. Attra has been supporting this global financial institution in the areas of VisionPLUS for the past 5 years and Postilion (A Payment Switch) for the past 2 years. As part of this contract, in addition to VisionPLUS and Postilion support, Attra will be providing 24*7 Production support and application support for Falcon (A Fair Isaac Product) and ChangeMan ( A source Management product from Serena) across 12 countries in a 100 % offshore delivery model

The consolidated support model provides a significant cost reduction and improved efficiencies to the Customer.

This win re-enforces the partnership between the Customer and Attra and demonstrates Attra’s commitment to work as a true strategic partner to all its customers.

In the payment cards domain, especially Debit & Credit space in which I work, one such format is ISO8583. This is a standard defined by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for financial transaction card originated messages. This standard is widely used by many organizations inclusive of MasterCard and VISA networks. ISO8583 is a bitmap based format, where different types of messages are identified by four byte message type indicators (MTIs), followed by the bitmap of the data-elements, and then by the data-elements which contain the data itself.

Similarly in the securities space, one of the key data format standards is ISO 15022 – SWIFT. These messages are formatted in a different manner from that of ISO8583. Each message has a 3 byte message type indicator, and the data is represented in the form of tags. The tag and its corresponding value are sent on the message.

Each of these data formats/standards have been devised to meet that particular domains’ expectation, for example ISO 8583 message format would carry data related to the payment cards. ISO 15022 would carry information related to securities. The representation of the data also is different between these formats. For example, currency of the transaction in the ISO 15022 format is present in tag: 11A, but in the ISO 8583, the currency is present in the Data Element 49 of the message.

Numerous numbers of aforesaid formats are actively used in the market across domains and geographies, which create a lot of overhead to the financial institutions in offering different services to its customers. For example, if the bank plans to offer a service where using its debit card, the customer should be able to buy some securities, the bank has to generate two different messages in different formats one in ISO 8583 to update its debit card and one in ISO 15022 to buy the securities. This acts as an overhead to the bank to maintain two different formats.

In the current market place, where the customer expects everything to be a click away, financial institutions have to offer innovative products (banking, payments, securities etc), spanned over different financial institutions across geographical boundaries. This drives a need to maintain a common format across different domains. This common format should be able to carry the business function and the related data.

While browsing over the internet, I found an interesting development that is happening around this area in the industry i.e., evolution of a new standard by ISO namely ISO 20022.  The aim of this format is to allow smooth inter-operability between the financial institutions, by standardizing the data formats across domains. Each financial institution/domain uses its own terminologies to define the different business concepts. Idea of this format is to standardize the terminologies used by different institutions and define them in the ISO 20022 data dictionary. By using this standardized data models, developers can build syntax independent message models, which can be transformed into different messages according to desired syntax.  The current preferred syntax is XML format. In this format the business model is to be defined first, which means

-          What is type of activity?

-          Who are the parties involved?

-          What is the information need to complete the activity?

All the business functions are grouped to a root business function which would contain the parties/elements that corresponding to the root business function and each specific business function would have its own additional elements.

Business Function (ex: Payment) -> Actual Function (ex: Credit Transfer) -> Actual Message Syntax (ex: XML).

For example, a credit card payment or money transfer falls under the same umbrella of a payment function, which would involve a debtor, creditor, debtor bank and a creditor bank. Specific to the credit card payment, there would be elements like expiry date etc, a remittance date for a money transfer. This hierarchical model of grouping the common elements allows re-usability of the function defined. Thus, this data format standardizes the messages across the industry. So whenever a message comes for a credit card payment, it can clearly know, what to expect in the message.

Technically, XML is the best suite to store all the message format and corresponding descriptions, which can be stored under an XML schema. XML files are machine readable; hence addition or maintenance of the messages is easy and requires less manual effort. Being an international standard, it enjoys support of lot of software tools for maintenance of the message schema at a lower cost.

There are also certain technical considerations to be kept in mind for this new ISO 20022 formats. ISO 8583 occupies at the maximum of 3500-4000 bytes of space per message. But if the same number of data elements are to put on a XML message considering the XML tags, my guesstimate is that the message length would be at least 10 times the normal ISO 8583 messages. It means that the more data is to be put on the network resulting in higher bandwidth requirement though it should still be manageable.

Finally thanks to “ISO 20022 for Dummies” (Dummies, Yeah it’s me) and “http://www.iso20022.org/” for putting some information over the web, for people like me to read J

 This marks Attra’s foray into areas such as Infrastructure management services.

 IACC organized a workshop last month on “Off-shoring and Outsourcing Opportunities in Australia and the Asia-Pacific Region”. Attra has a long standing relationship with Indo-Australian Chamber of Commerce. Attra CEO, Prasad Guntupalli was one of the chosen delegates and a panel member to present at this workshop. Prasad had presented on the story of how Attra emerged into a global IT services company from a high-end consulting firm.

Attra’s team would support the project through its best shoring model.