Case Study

Gazprom time travels Energy Risk Management System with TimeShiftX^®

Gazprom developed an updated Gas Storage & Logistics software application within their energy risk management system. Being locked in Active Directory, Gazprom leveraged TimeShiftX to enable time travel in their environment. With TimeShiftX, Gazprom was able to run full energy simulations to ensure system reliability and stability.

Business Needs

Gazprom was developing an upgraded Gas Storage & Logistics software application to enhance their energy risk management system. Their original application was based on a legacy system and architecture. Gazprom’s intent was to upgrade the system to add new functionality, provide major improvements, and leverage the latest technologies.

This Gas system is responsible for various functionality like tracking gas delivery, storage, and overall logistics. This system needs to adjust for various special events throughout the year such as Summers, Winters, Daylight Savings Backward, and Daylight Savings Forward. The most important event is “Gas Day” where throughout the European continent the start time for the day changes by 1 hour. This differential is critical to test to know how much gas is delivered on a day, received, transacted, etc.

The environment is contained within Active Directory and runs on a mixed infrastructure. The application is home grown based on a myriad of programming languages and relies on backend server databases. Given the array of technology and products used and the inability to change times due to Active Directory, the Gazprom technical team needed an easy and complete time travel software solution.

Solution

The main requirement the Gazprom team needed was a time shifting software solution that worked with Active Directory and a mixed technology stack. After an evaluation, Gazprom selected TimeShiftX due to its total compatibility with all technologies, especially Active Directory, and its ease of use and integration.

In this upgrade, the key was verifying software application functionality in special future date events, specifically Gas Day, Daylight Savings, Summers, and Winters. With TimeShiftX, the development and QA team were able to generate granular “virtual times” and run entire energy simulations on these special events, thus enhancing the system’s functionality and reliability on those events.

Benefit

Through incorporating TimeShiftX into their project, Gazprom was able to seamlessly date shift their entire distributed application, even inside Active Directory. This ability empowered Gazprom to completely test all business rules and special cases to ensure system reliability once launched.

TimeShiftX allowed the development team to maintain their existing architecture and preserve all their application configurations and environment settings. In addition, the Gazprom team utilized the TimeShiftX to synchronize their time travel testing across all their environment layers from a single click. This power allowed both developers and testers to time travel in parallel their necessary components and increase overall efficiency.

Reduced Development Times

For Gazprom, the TimeShiftX software solution provided the team with the opportunity to quickly time shift test the entire application stack (from one click) to provide results immediately to the QA and development teams. This benefited the team by reducing the discovery, investigation, and resolution of date bugs throughout the codebase, thus streamlining the process and reducing development times.

Enabled Time Travel within Active Directory

Active Directory (like Kerberos and other domain security authentication protocols) has a security restriction where a time change of ~5 minutes kicks servers off the domain and blocks time travel.

By using TimeShiftX, Gazprom was able to remove this major roadblock as TimeShiftX allows time travel within Active Directory seamlessly. Without TimeShiftX the team would have been unable to effectively time test their future dates and risked system instability in production.

Complete Technology Compatibility

Gazprom’s technology stack was a blend of languages and 3rd party software. In the beginning of the project this mixed technology stack seems unattainable to time shift. However by leveraging TimeShiftX, the Gazprom team was able to time travel their entire stack easily and in an almost plug-in-play fashion. This allowed the team to focus on developing and launching their Gas storage & logistics application and not on managing time on individual applications.

Increased Testing Coverage & Efficiency

With instant time shifts to exact future dates, the Gazprom development teams work more efficiently. Instead of not time shift testing or waiting 6 months for special events to roll over, teams can immediately travel to any date and run simulations. This power has generated new test cases and date simulations within the team. The TimeShiftX solution deploys "virtual times" which makes it possible for Gazprom to test features instantly, without limitation, all while maintain environment integrity.