Time Machine^®     

Time Machine^®, a patent-pending software product, provides virtual clocks to facilitate application testing, what-if analyses and time zone adjustment. It is a proven solution widely utilized by Fortune 500 and global 1000 companies.  

Time Machine provides up to 20,000 virtual clocks per system, each of which can be set to any time in the past, present or future, and can run up to 1000 times faster or slower then system clock or be frozen in time.  

Time Machine eliminates the needs to reset the system clock, which is time consuming, error prone and not possible under Active Directory or in a Kerberos secured environment.  

Time Machine Benefits:

NEW: Time Machine Web Console

The Web-based Time Machine Controller Console enhances the management of Time Machine by giving users the ability to securely manage virtual clocks across any number of systems running Time Machine via a simple web browser interface. In addition to the enhanced ease of use, it also allows any authenticated user to set virtual dates for other accounts on any Windows, UNIX, or Linux system, eliminating the previous requirement to manually set the Time Machine virtual dates on each system.

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Quotes:

"Not using Time Machine has created a huge mess in new implementations. For all new projects moving forward Time Machine will be used as a standard for our testing requirements, ultimately this will satisfy our clients' needs."
Andrew Strain,
Platforms & Infrastructure Service Delivery Lead.
Accenture UK

"The Time machine software has significantly increased our testing productivity for changes we make to our billing system.  It’s saved us countless hours. What Time Machine does, it does very, very well.”
Jackson Wong
Customer Systems Business Analyst
City West Water

"Nordea has a large and complex test environment, with high requirements on security on stability. Time Machine enabled us to test some of our biggest and most visible applications, with very little affecting our infrastructural setup. I can warmly recommend Time Machine when there is a need to simulate date and time."
Jonas Nilsson, Sub Unit Manager
Nordea Bank

"Time Machine is invaluable for our on-time deployment of the Change Program Management System (CPMS) for our client, The Australian Taxation Office.   I really appreciate the quick turn-around time from Solution-Soft team on this requirement.  This is indicative of the professional and consistent service that Solution-Soft has been providing us on an on-going basis which in turn has helped us to deliver and meet our clients requirements in a timely manner."
Rahul Joshi, Information Analyst
EDS Australia

"At Medavie Blue Cross, we have to conduct date forward testing for our internal provincial claims systems on a regular basis. With Time Machine, we're able to host multiple Oracle testing environments on the same system for multiple developers and testers. This not only saves significant costs for potential hardware and software, but also streamlines our application testing process."  Read More...
Michael Jones, UNIX System Administrator
Medavie Blue Cross

Solution-Soft’s numerous customers have found that using Time Machine to test and validate all date & time logic within their new or migrated environments has allowed them to complete their migration process on-time and under budget.  By providing unique and individual virtual dates & times to users of the system, Time Machine can allow any tester to run any module under any specific virtual date needed. This allows the testing group to simultaneously run certain processes with a simulated end-of-month, while others can be checked for any future year-end validity, and other applications run in real-time.  Users of Time Machine can easily condense a months’ worth of processing down to a week, or years’ worth of processing to a month.

Migration and testing are both very specialized, functional disciplines that demand resources with the appropriate experience, specialization skills, and tools.  Examples of these changes in an environment include the software being run on a new hardware platform, alterations to the application or interacting with different software.  Fully testing migrated applications to guarantee they correctly handle temporal (date & time) logic is critical. A single defect may result in a wide range of failure symptoms.  It is commonly believed that the earlier a defect is found the cheaper it is to fix it. A common cause of software failure (real or perceived) is a lack of compatibility with other software or when run on another operating system (even different versions), or target environments that differ greatly from the original. If migrated applications can no longer correctly handle month-end billing, year-end financials or time-based expiry events you will be putting your business at risk.  

Benefits of using Time Machine in Application Migration Testing:

How do I avoid the Active Directory aka Kerberos "time-skew" issue with forward date testing?
In a network environment where secure logins are used, such as with Microsoft's Active Directory, Novell's eDirectory, or Sun Microsystems' Sun One directory services, users login in with a time-based ticketing system through Kerberos, a network authentication protocol.  One of the procedures employed by the Kerberos process to maintain network security is the hard requirement that any machine that participates in the network must have its system clock synchronized to be no more than five minutes different than the Domain Controller's time.  This clock synchronization is necessary to prevent an attacker from using an old authenticator to masquerade as a valid user.  The exclusion feature in Time Machine overcomes this issue by allowing the Kerberos login's dynamically linked libraries and executables to run under the valid system time, so that all access tokens are requested with the correct time.  This process, combined with Time Machine's file date-stamping (using real-time variables), ensures that all backups function correctly, file replication services run without disruption, and all machines running Time Machine can freely participate in the secure network.

How does Time Machine work?
Whether you running a simple monolithic application directly on the console of a machine or deploying a multi-tiered web-distributed application is irrelevant to the use of Time Machine.   In either case, or all those in-between, there is a named application (or set of applications) that when they need to get the time, they will make a system call or access another application that makes the system call.  It is at that point that our software comes into play and delivers back to the application whichever virtual date is set.  By being a virtualization layer between all applications and the system Kernel we are able to guarantee completely that any named application (or set of applications) will see the desired virtual date.