Accepting multiple currencies balanced by Performance Testing

I thought I might take a minute to mention what I was up to at work.  My work is currently 2-fold.  My role in continually updating the SK Chase system, is steadily growing.  Following last month's launch of a fuller and inevitably more complex checkout and payment process, the next challenge is to make the system fully capable of handling multiple currencies.  This may seem a nominal change and to an outsider may be slightly easier compared to getting the checkout process correct.  (A bad checkout process will cost sales!) But in SK Chase's case, this is not that simple.  As the system handles catalogues for many hotels and not just the one site, the system has to be culture-less.  With SK Chase growing, the need to have a culture-less system allows them to take on clients that do not use the British Pound as their main currency but the US dollar or the Euro.  This is however difficult to balance.  The back-end and reporting particularly is a challenge, an almost complete rewrite of the report templates will be required in order to balance generalities with the need for strongly typed financial reports.  It is a fun challenge for myself.

Concurrently we are also undertaking a strong degree of performance and load testing.  This is important from both the business and technical point of view.   And many sites can explain it better than me!  Basically, we need to know whether we can handle the number of visitors and the actions that they perform that have been predicted.  This is a case of learning to write specific testing scripts invariably in a new language to what I am used to.  A busy time for me with these two running side by side.

As a side dish, I am liaising with Visa and MasterCard accredited auditors, such that SK Chase become fully compliant with the PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry - Data Storage Standards) that will allow SK Chase to be accredited by the leading payment card providers in the world. An interesting bit on the side!!