Simulating systems communicating with file transfers to save time and enable automated testing

Sending and receiving files is a common way of exchanging information in many industries. Two main ones are banking (for example SWIFT) and telecommunications (for example mobile number porting). They are typically shared over local filesystems, NFS or FTP/SFTP.

This raises issues like:

• Setting up test data in the third party or backend systems slows down developers and testers on your team
• Creating response files based on request files without the third party or backend system is done manually

You can create files manually, but:

• Creating files manually will not work when you are running automated tests
• Crafting files manually is error-prone
• Crafting files manually is time-consuming
• Sometimes response files need to be present within only a few seconds because the application times out otherwise, so there is no time to create them manually

Traffic Parrot comes with help. It now supports service virtualization, simulating and mocking of systems communicating with file transfers over local filesystems, network filesystems like NFS or mounted shared filesystems (with beta FTP and SFTP available).

Simulating systems communicating with files

You can:

• Consume request files
• Produce response files
• Record and replay communication with files
• Create manually request to response file mappings
• Generate dynamic response file names (scriptability)
• Generate dynamic response file content based on request file content (scriptability)

Example of a request to response file mapping

For more information have a look at the files transfers documentation.