Reliability of Store Integrator (SI) for Retail Store System
Shirley Chao
The 17th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2006) -- Industry Practices (ISSRE 2006)
Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, 6-10 November 2006
Abstract
Store Integrator (SI), extends base existing POS applications to Application Extension Facility (AEF) such that local store controllers can be implemented as Client Session Servers (CSS) to support many remote virtual terminal clients. Communications between 4690 Controllers (Session Servers) and WINDOWS (Session Clients) are very complicated. The reliability of SI for a retail store system is the key to its success. In this paper, system testing using automatic regression and simulator tools is carried out to ensure system integrity without thread deadlock or any data loss. The test bed is configured to emulate real store operations under various scenarios to test the system typical day, reliability and availability. System analyses have been successfully carried out and the results indicate that all system activities are working as expected and that the SI is highly reliable in that the system does not have memory or socket loss. Individual CSS terminals and the whole system have kept intact data during all system tests. Although the IBM’ SI system is proved to be highly robust, the CSS servers are not 100% fail-safe. Thus, one feature that enables “failover” of a session from the failing controller to a backup controller in order to allow customers to continue using these virtual sessions will be included in future SI versions. One major security concern for protecting customer’s sensitive private information has been considered but not included in this paper. Two Socket Security Layer (SSL) of enablement, i.e. between the CSS Server and CSS Clients and between the POSBC Server (JIF) and POSBC Clients have been added for encrypting sensitive data to be applied to all types of terminals. Ethereal is the tool for testing credit card encryption.