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Migration from one version to a higher version of document standards

Messaging standards are continuously evolving to support the ever changing business needs in the financial services industry. For ex. There have been several versions of the FiX and FpML standards over 14 years not counting the minor releases and fixes. Organizations have to adopt newer versions of the messages as frequently as once in two years depending on their growing messaging needs. However, experience shows that migration from one version to a higher version is a painful and time consuming exercise involving rewrite of message transformations and regression testing the applications.

MOND has rendered migration from one version to a higher a trivial exercise, by its semantic transformation technology. The separation of document structures from mapping logic simplifies the whole migration by eliminating the need to rewrite the mapping logic. Just by changing the target document type to a higher version of the message for a transformation map, the message can be generated in the newer format. The only changes that would be required in the mapping logic are to map any new fields that are added to the higher version of the document.

Migration from one document standard to another or adopting an additional standard

Similarly, MOND reduces the time and effort to migrate to newer document standards or to adopt additional document standard. The transformation maps for producing a particular business message in the existing document standard can work for the new document standard also. However, mapping logic has to be changed for those fields where the Code list values vary between each document standard. For ex. the Product type code list may vary in different FiX versions. Hence, for mapping the Product type field, a separate code list has to be invoked within the mapping logic. The extent of changes / effort can be minimised so long as proper Business Terms are associated for the fields in both the document standards from out of the Business Terms dictionary maintained on MOND.

MOND for testing

More often than not, Organizations in the Financial Services industry are encountered with the task of upgrading their systems. For successful system upgrades, regression testing plays a very crucial role. MOND provides a standalone Testing module, first of its kind, suitable for B2B message testing and comparison. For regression testing, comparison of business messages generated post migration with the business messages generated prior to migration is essential and file comparison tools grossly fall short of being able to do field level comparisons in messages. Even most of the testing tools incorporate plain file comparison utilities and so are unsuitable for business message testing. Further, the notion of a field itself is different in different document standards, for ex. a field in an XML is an xml element, a field in a CSV is a token embedded between 2 delimiters and a field in XLs is a column.

MOND is an industry first product to provide field level testing and comparison capability across all these different document standards. Again there are requirements in migration testing where tolerances have to be defined for selective numeric fields like difference between the values of a field should be 0.005% between the pre-migration and post-migration message. Leaving all the tools much behind, MOND also provides capability wherein users can define Test cases with tolerances for selective fields. While comparing the files, MOND will check if the value in the post-migration message is within the tolerances set for the respective fields in the pre-migration message. Fields where the values are not matching are highlighted in red.

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