The ultimate goals of any software-testing regime, including the financial sector, are to make the software more robust and reliable, thereby reducing support costs and increasing customer satisfaction. Recent trends to use unit testing and other techniques in the software build process help reach those goals. However with the move towards systems of interacting services, full-scale system tests are critical, yet are rarely done as systematically or completely as unit tests because of the large manual effort required to deploy a full-scale system and run the tests.
Cloud computing, a new computing technology, has made automation of full-scale system tests possible. Commercial cloud computing services, such as Amazon Web Services, provides a convenient, dynamic backend infrastructure avoiding the need to interact directly with system administrators for machine deployment. Prior research work has shown how to run tests in such environments and capture the relevant deployment and test information.
SixSq provides a framework called SlipStream, using cloud computing, to automate the deployment of a complete set of services for tests, running those tests, collecting results, and tearing down the test deployment. Using the dynamic pool of resources that clouds provide allows the automatic, low-cost deployment of test configurations, thus delivering unprecedented software release predictability, thus lowering project risks, higher quality.
The background and concept behind SlipStream were first presented at the 2008 edition of GTAC (Goole Test Automation Conference) in Seattle, USA. This presentation briefly presents the need for automated full-scale system tests; it continues with an explanation of the technical aspects of using cloud computing to provide a framework for these types of tests and a summary of early results. It finishes with sharing early results of exploitation of SlipStream, focusing specially on the challenges the finance world is facing in testing its applications, including the need for high security and large test data sets.

Following Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering studies, Marc-Elian worked from 1994 to 2004 in industry in the space domain for customers such as the Canadian and European Space Agencies, as well as the Canadian and European Space industries. He specialized in real-time system simulators and test-bed development and contributed to the delivery of no less than a dozen systems. Moving on from the space field in 2004, he joined CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva) in the Grid Computing group on the EGEE project (the largest public grid infrastructure project). In 2006 he joined the CERN team leading the ETICS project, which provides automated build and test services for managing complex software, using on grid technology. In the summer of 2007, Marc-Elian co-created SixSq, with co-autor Charles Loomis, a company based in Geneva, which provides agile applications and tools, as well as software services and consultancy to deliver solutions to reduce costs in managing software and IT infrastructures. He contributes to the company as software and business developer.

Charles trained as a high-energy physicist and worked on major high- energy physics experiments in the first part of his career. This type
of research requires facility with all aspects of computing:
programming
custom electronics, developing software, managing code, and exploiting distributed computing facilities. His work has given him extensive, practical experience in all these areas. Since 2001, he has concentrated on grid technology projects—contributing to the design, development, and
deployment of software systems produced by those projects. In August
2007, he co-founded SixSq Sàrl and contributes as a manager, designer, and developer.