IBM Mainframe Banking System Automated Test Platform

Due to business requirement and historical reasons, currently international commercial bank is still having its backend core business systems running on the IBM mainframe OS/390in COBOL codes, with3270terminal emulators as its user interface. Therefore, the system testing of3270-based systems is quite different comparing to the testing of graphical user interface or Web interface systems. Especially for banking finance management system, the General Ledger reconciliation testing requires to analyze a dozen of the host reports, each of which contains thousands of records, the tester normally needs to download the reports to local storage from host via3270screen, and then extract the required records to Microsoft Excel document and compare, which is very time-consuming and easy to make mistake. Nevertheless, currently on the market, there has been a few number of automated test software based on3270terminal screens, that can help the testers to download the reports, and also specific software to extract records from fixed format text file to Excel document, but due to that different business units worldwide are using different3270terminal emulation software, the reports layouts varies quite often, and large multinational banks has higher requirement on the safety and the dedicated environment, these software either cannot meet the bank the complexity of the status quo or demand, or require high maintenance costs.In terms of the above problems and the status quo, combined with practical work, this paper leverages the object-oriented software engineering methods, going thru the requirements analysis, system design and coding, it provides a solution combining configurable report data extraction and unique simulator terminal interface. This paper starts with to the understanding of business user environment requirement, followed by the requirement analysis of financial management system general ledger reconciliation testing approach and its automation, and the system design for test data extraction from backend host reports using configurable report format setting file. Considering that the interface between host report testing module and the host3270terminal will also be used for other testing modules, it proposes to adopt middleware based on object-oriented packaging technology, makes the client session with the mainframe as object, so that all the operations of mainframe, as the object’s internal operations to achieve in order to build a unique testing interface platform for different terminal clients. By using the abstract class inherited by the individual terminal class, the system establishes a common operational testing interface platform that is independent with the client terminal software. This enables the testing departments to connect through different3270terminal software used by the Bank’s global business units via this unique interface, and then enter the business system of those departments for the common automated testing. Lastly, based on the usage feedback from the testers, some of the functions have been improved, the result proves that the platform greatly enhances the efficiency of the banking system mainframe interface testing, reduces the probability of errors caused by manual testing, and brings great convenience for future testing maintenance and regression testing as well, saving the cost of testing and shortens the product go live duration.