ING Insurance Central Europe “ICE project”

The “Vision for Growth” program includes developing and deploying an integrated solution for ING Insurance for all of Europe and Russia. The ILIS/ESB project is part of this program and delivers a TIBCO software-based service layer.

A small team of two was assigned to develop integrations and configure the Enterprise Service Bus. The TIBCO software had to be installed on three separate Linux servers in a DEV/TEST/ACC/PROD environment. The project team decided that installation and configuration  of every environment by hand would take too much time and an automated installation procedure was needed. Another challenge was that the required server hardware was not available on time.

Mr Ritter came up with the following solution:

• use RPM as a fully automated  installation solution.
• using a virtual server environment as a temporary replacement for the missing hardware

Mr Ritter  installed a virtualization product called VirtualBox on his laptop that allows to run a virtual Linux server. This product allows him to simulate the deployment environment and  saved the project lot of time.

Mr Ritter was responsible for installation, configuration and testing:

• Installation and configuration
  • Configuration of TIBCO BusinessWorks software
  • Designing and developing an automatic installation method based on Redhat Package Manager (RPM) on Linux servers
  • Designing and developing a scripted service deployment method
  • Organizing security (role-based, PKI Certificates)
  • Implemented SELinux security policies
  • Setting up a logging framework for functional errors
• Testing
  • Generate test data with Benerator this excelent free and open source tool enabled us to generate test data with real Polisch names
    

    Testdata generator

  • Functional and performance testing of web services  (SoapUI), developed java scripts
• Documentation of installation, configuration and deployment procedures

Fortis Bank Nederland “Enterprise Service Bus”

Due to the expected integration of Fortis with ABN-AMRO the need arose to be prepared for integration. The ESBM project was setup to deliver an Enterprise Service Bus based on WebServices with Soap over http, WS-Security and MQSeries.

Mr Ritter was asked to design and develop an ESB implementation with the following requirements:

• Based on the IBM Websphere Messagebroker platform
• Define modulair building blocks which can be easily replaced and changed
• Support for webservices (WS-Security)
• Http and MQ transport
• Support for error tracking and tracing

In two months he delivered a proof of concept version showing its ability to integrate an Oracle application with a mainframe application. During the demonstration performance test where executed using the SoapUI WebService test tool.

Fortis Bank Nederland “Martini Trading System”

A new trading system

A new securities trading system is implemented that provides the trader with a better view on his position. The SunGard Martini front-end is hosted in England and connects to the Fortis backend systems in Belgium. Mr Ritter was asked to design and develop all interfaces based on WebSphere MessageBroker and MQSeries SWIFT messages.

Application monitoring

Soon after a first deployment trial a new requirement for application monitoring on technical and application errors was discovered. The existing tooling for application monitoring (Tivoli)  proved not to be sufficient. Brainstorm sessions where held and together with the technical support department a new approach for error handling and transaction monitoring was developed.

Mr Ritter designed a system for collecting, recording and reporting on errors from various online and batch processes based on open source software. This system is able to monitor transactions within the system, collect and analyze the errors, and forward this information by email to the appropriate problem solving group  (technical or application support). The current status of transactions and errors can be followed with a webbrowser on a Tomcat web application and transactions restarted. This setup turned out to be a great advantage because during first deployment trials several errors were found and could now be solved before entering production.

Bank Mendes Gans NV Web App testing

Bank Mendes Gans

The Mendes Gans bank is a small bank founded in 1883 and now part of the ING groep. The bank specializes in cash management and provides Netting and Cash Pool services. The customer wanted to stress test their web based customer support application to prevent performance problems.

Mr Ritter was asked to:

• setup a flexible and reusable web application test framework,
• perform automated functional and performance tests
• report on the results.

grinder.sourceforge.net

Mr Ritter selected Grinder and Python script as the best test tools for this occation and developed a test framework for Mendes Gans bank that is able to simulate end-user behavior. As a result of his testing he found some bottlenecks in the database access layer. The problems could be solved by optimizing and changing the database queries.