LPL Financial QA Test Harness & BI Automation

Built white-box QA test harnesses for BI systems at LPL Financial with custom PDF/XML comparators and HPQC reporting integration.

LPL Financial required a robust white-box QA automation framework to validate its Portfolio Manager Business Intelligence and Reporting systems during an intensive development cycle. The challenge involved automating the verification of generated financial reports—typically rendered in PDF and XML—against strict business logic and format compliance.

TaylorMade Software was contracted to design and develop a suite of custom QA test harnesses. We built a PDF comparator engine to perform visual and structural diffing of generated report PDFs, along with a flexible XML comparator that supported regular expression filters for dynamic values such as dates and timestamps.

The testing suite included a data-to-XML exporter for Active Reports outputs, enabling structured comparison across test runs. Additionally, we wrote analytical reports against HP Quality Center’s internal database to surface metrics on test coverage, defect trends, and feature completeness throughout the SDLC.

This framework enabled high-confidence regression testing and continuous quality tracking for LPL's mission-critical BI applications.