Any suggestions on making good QA for an EA?

[mike_s]

If you can give some advice or list your way of QA for EA and for backtesting it will be great.

Thanks in advance!

[baq]

msbusinessil:

If you can give some advice or list your way of QA for EA and for backtesting it will be great.

Thanks in advance!

Just from top of my head :)

1. Look for errors, order opening, order modification. There should be none of those.

2. Most of my strategies contain equal (but of course reversed) management of short and long orders. If I notice that one of these has different win or profit ratio than the other, I investigate the code once again.

3. Make sure that you are testing with standard spread (sometimes broker rises spread Friday evening and your tester uses it for the whole weekend). It's good to have an off-line MT4 instance with up to date data.

4. Test both, on broker data and on MT4 data. Results may not be identical, but should be more or less similar.

5. Investigate chart bar by bar with all the indicators used in an EA. Trades should ideally reflect your algorithm.

6. Test live on demo account and do the same as for 5.

7. Run on live real account and at the same time start fresh instance of Demo account with the same script and broker. Any mismatched result should cause you to turn off the real account script.