Exactpro, th2 won Best in Operational Resiliency at the 2021 Markets Choice Awards.

Markets Media caught upon with Natalia Kryukova, Senior Project Manager, Platform, th2 Framework, to learn more.

What is your reaction to Exactpro’s th2 winning Best in Operational Resiliency in the 2021 Markets Choice Awards?

The recognition in this category means a lot for the company as we have always been passionate about what we do to ensure the resilience of our clients’ platforms and, from a more general perspective, to contribute to the stability of the global capital markets. Personally, I also feel very proud for the entire th2 team, whose determined collaborative effort made this possible. This award is indeed well deserved: our developers, DevOps, business analysts, software architects, and software testers did – and continue to do – an amazing job developing and enhancing our next-generation test automation framework.

Please describe what th2 is all about – what are the primary capabilities and how is it unique in providing operational resilience?

th2 offers financial infrastructures a comprehensive end-to-end technology agnostic AI-driven test automation solution which aims to help regulated capital markets participants stay compliant and resilient to disruption, while focusing on innovation and having the freedom to embrace emerging technologies, most relevant to their business needs. Built with these goals in mind, th2 brings unprecedented flexibility, breadth and depth of software testing to the financial industry in the drive for improved operational resilience.

The th2 toolkit is designed to enable automation in functional and non-functional testing for complex distributed transaction processing systems, such as securities trading systems and exchanges, banking, brokerage, post-trade (e.g. clearing, settlement, custody), and payments platforms. th2 is a Kubernetes-driven microservices solution. It operates by leveraging a technology stack with an open interface, allowing users to adopt digital technology such as the cloud and distributed ledger technology (DLT). It can integrate with a wide range of existing test tools, frameworks, and network protocols.

The platform can withstand heavy testing loads, improving test coverage, system quality, and resilience. This is complemented by a range of enhanced data capabilities including faster data processing and unified storage of test results, providing the ability to perform the analysis of massive amounts of generated test evidence to ensure regulatory compliance.

How has the marketplace’s need for operational resiliency evolved and how has Exactpro adapted?

The demand for enhanced measures to ensure operational resilience has dramatically increased as a natural response to disruptive events of the past year. Another factor contributing to this growing demand is the trend of strengthening regulation around the financial institutions’ liability for major disruptions impacting the stability of the global capital market.

To ensure high availability and orderly operation of the underlying technology means to test it out against most unrealistic scenarios – the ones which actually proved to be quite realistic in the face of uncertainty and high variability witnessed in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to provide the capabilities for large-scale and high-coverage testing, Exactpro test automation tool suite had to adapt, and this was achieved by th2. Built as a set of microservices, it allows for passive testing through massive querying across the test execution data, distilling the knowledge from the whole warehouse. It also supports data combination and mutation approaches to generate new test data and use it for active testing to ensure coverage of diverse scenarios under various market conditions.

What are recent initiatives/accomplishments for the th2 platform?

Deployed in a number of client projects, th2 has already been successfully deployed in a number of use cases. Its first adopter – Airbus’ subsidiary Skytra – harnessed the technology for its derivatives trading software. Another implementation was accomplished for ML-driven testing of Quod Financial’s technology. The most recent initiative involving th2 is around building a test library using the platform’s model-based capabilities as part of the effort to deliver functional testing and ensure the resilience of LedgerEdge’s global corporate bond trading platform powered by distributed ledger technology.

What does the future hold for the th2 framework developed by Exactpro?

th2 represents the next generation of automated testing platforms. We believe its usage will eventually transform the way firms approach their functional and non-functional testing processes. With the aim to increase the tool’s accessibility across the industry, the th2 source code was released to GitHub in December 2020 and is open for contributions from the professional community.

Over the coming months, we are planning to roll out the framework across Exactpro’s entire international client base. We have already seen first successful implementations and look forward to developing further use cases with our clients and partners.