Optimizing Trading Platform Performance: Minimizing Downtime and Maximizing Reliability for a Leading Brokerage Firm

Context

In the highly competitive trading industry, downtime during peak trading hours can result in significant financial losses and erosion of client trust. Our client, a leading trading and investment platform with over 500,000 clients, specializes as a discount broker facilitating online trading in Equity, Currency, Commodity, IPOs, F&O, and Mutual Funds. They faced critical challenges with application stability during peak trading hours and required a dependable, high-quality assurance setup to deliver stable applications consistently.

Solution

Qualitrix provided complete QA ownership, setting up test processes, defect management, reporting mechanisms, and governance calls across pods. Our domain experts conducted contextual functional testing and performance testing, ensuring critical defects were identified and addressed before and after market hours to minimize downtime and bugs. This holistic approach stabilized the trading application during core market hours, significantly improving its reliability.

Technology

  • Postman & Swagger: Streamlined API testing, ensuring robust integration and communication between trading systems.
  • MySql & Kibana: Enabled efficient database management and real-time monitoring of trading activities.
  • BrowserStack & Free Simulators: Facilitated extensive multi-device testing, ensuring a seamless trading experience across various platforms.
  • Apache JMeter: Conducted load testing to simulate high-volume trading scenarios, ensuring the platform could handle peak loads without performance degradation.

Highlights

  • Stability During Peak Hours: Achieved unprecedented stability for the trading application during core market hours.
  • Rapid Defect Identification: Domain experts rapidly identified and addressed functional defects, enhancing overall quality.
  • Scalable Testing: Designed and executed over 3,000 test cases, reporting 600+ critical and major bugs, significantly improving application quality.
  • Performance Under Load: Successfully stress-tested scenarios like 10,000 consecutive order purchases and 50,000 additions to favourite lists, ensuring the platform’s robustness.

Conclusion

The collaboration with Qualitrix empowered our client to overcome the critical challenge of ensuring uninterrupted service during peak trading hours. By leveraging deep domain expertise and a tailored QA strategy, we not only stabilized the trading application but also enhanced its performance and reliability under high-stress conditions. The reduction in downtime and the significant improvement in defect detection were pivotal in delivering a seamless and robust trading experience for over 500,000 users. This case study underscores the importance of strategic QA partnerships in driving operational excellence and sustaining competitive advantage in the fast-paced trading industry.

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