If you've ever tried automating the FIS Cross-Asset Trading and Risk Platform (formerly Front Arena), you know the frustration. It’s like playing chess when the pieces won't stop moving. No matter how carefully you set up your scripts, something always breaks.
The UI constantly changes, automation tools struggle to locate the right elements, and you're stuck maintaining tests rather than running them.
Financial institutions depend on this platform for trading, risk management, and compliance operations. Given how critical it is, testing needs to be reliable, fast, and scalable. Unfortunately, traditional automation methods often can’t handle the complexity of this system's UI.
This article will explore why automating Front Arena is uniquely challenging and why traditional tools fail.
Why is Testing Front Arena Difficult?
1. A Complex and Dynamic UI
Unlike standard enterprise applications, Front Arena’s UI is not static. It includes real-time data feeds, interactive charts, and dynamic workspaces that continuously change.
Traditional test automation tools struggle to recognize and interact with these components. Elements that exist during one test execution may shift, disappear, or reload during the next, leading to false negatives and script failures.
2. Constant UI Changes Break Automation
Every time the FIS Cross-Asset Trading and Risk Platform (formerly Front Arena) gets updated, its UI can shift significantly. Buttons, fields, and especially graphical tables might move or change.
Because most automation tools rely on stable UI structures, tests break easily, forcing teams into endless script repairs.
3. Traditional Automation Tools Can’t Handle Complex UI
When testing FIS Cross-Asset Trading and Risk Platform, traditional tools fail completely. One real-world scenario showed one automation tool capturing only a black screen, while another gave nonsensical text results.
These limitations force financial institutions to rely on manual testing, which is slow and risky.
4. Graphical Tables Are a Major Automation Roadblock
A big reason conventional automation tools fail with this platform is the heavy use of graphical tables.
Regular automation methods can’t accurately read or interact with these tables, causing tests to fail. Without reliable table recognition, automated testing becomes practically impossible.
5. Automation Speed and Performance Issues
Since this platform processes large volumes of real-time financial data, slow test automation directly impacts performance.
Conventional automation approaches often slow down or can't keep up, making thorough automated testing challenging and inefficient.
Why Traditional Test Automation Tools Fall Short
Many financial institutions attempt to automate Front Arena using popular test automation frameworks, only to encounter major roadblocks. Here is why traditional tools are not up to the task:
- Inconsistent object recognition – These tools rely on object-based recognition, which is unreliable in Front Arena’s dynamic UI.
- Excessive maintenance effort – Frequent UI changes require continuous test script updates, leading to high maintenance costs.
- Execution failures due to black screens – Some tools fail to recognize Front Arena’s UI elements, resulting in test execution failures.
- Inability to handle complex table structures – Poor table detection leads to inaccurate data validation.
- Slow test execution – Many traditional tools slow down Front Arena’s performance, making large-scale test runs inefficient.
Making Front Arena Automation Easier
Automating Front Arena isn’t always straightforward. Interfaces change, tables behave unpredictably, and some automation tools struggle with object recognition. Instead of relying on fixed element locations, TestResults works dynamically, recognizing UI components as they appear rather than as they were when the test was first written.
One common frustration with Front Arena automation is how updates can break tests. A small UI change—like a button moving slightly or a label being renamed—shouldn’t cause an entire test to fail. Since TestResults doesn’t rely on static locators, it continues recognizing elements even when the UI changes.
Another issue is blank screens or missing elements. Some tools can’t handle instances where UI elements load differently than expected, leading to test failures that aren’t actual issues. With TestResults, UI elements remain visible and interactable throughout execution, ensuring automation runs smoothly without unnecessary troubleshooting.
Financial applications often involve complex tables, and automating interactions with them can be a challenge. Extracting, validating, and interacting with table data typically requires a rigid setup that can break when layouts change. TestResults simplifies this by recognizing and working with table structures dynamically, making it easier to pull the right information without constant adjustments.
A financial institution we collaborate with needed to automate a trading workflow across multiple systems. The process began in smartTrade Voice Trading (Web), where trades were placed, and continued in Front Arena (Desktop) for verification. The challenge was that these two systems weren’t directly connected, and the automation had to handle both without access to backend code.
TestResults allowed them to automate the entire workflow: placing trades, switching systems, and verifying data, all without requiring manual intervention. This eliminated repetitive checks and reduced errors while ensuring the automation remained stable even when the systems evolved.
Front Arena Doesn’t Have to Be a Nightmare
Automating the FIS Cross-Asset Trading and Risk Platform (formerly Front Arena) is no easy task. Its dynamic UI, frequent updates, and complex graphical tables make traditional automation tools unreliable. Scripts break, object recognition fails, and maintenance becomes a never-ending battle.
But that doesn’t mean automation is impossible. By using TestResults, financial institutions can bypass these challenges with dynamic UI recognition, stable automation that adapts to changes, and advanced table handling. Instead of struggling with black screens and script failures, you get a reliable, scalable solution that keeps pace with Front Arena’s complexity.
If your current automation setup is causing more headaches than solutions, it might be time to rethink your approach. With the right tools, Front Arena automation can be stable, efficient, and truly scalable.