Challenges in Telecoms Testing

The specific challenges that the Telecoms testing market have their basis in the complexity and diversity within the Operational Support Systems (OSS) Architecture and the associated commercial and financial pressures that exist to ensure first to market products.

The Telcos (large telecommunications service providers) are moving towards a standardised Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that has an emphasis on reusability and common capabilities in order to deliver consistent customer experience. These architectures will support the full range of business activities including:

• Customer Care, Billing and Order Processing;
• Service Execution Management;
• Resource Management;
• Portfolio Management;
• Enterprise Information Management;
• Collaborations (with Customers, Users, Employees, Partners and Suppliers).

A Telecoms tester must also possess skills and experience beyond the generic ability to write and execute tests. This is because of the varied range of functional areas that telecoms software testing encompasses:

• Technical Domain and Network Access areas
• Billing and payment processing
• Collaborations between telecoms service providers
• Customer Relation Management (CRM

There is also a need to have the relevant expertise to facilitate testing across the products and services offerings, for example:

• Mobile applications
• Broadband and internet applications
• IPTV (Internet TV)
• VOIP applications.

However, a single software tester can't be expected to possess the experience to cover all of these areas and functions. The tester must communicate effectively as it is imperative that they can converse throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) throughout the different test phases such as user acceptance testing and system integration testing.

There is also the issue of data to consider. This may result in the tester selecting or creating data for tests. Or in the case of the introduction of new platforms and data structures, there a need for data migration activities to take place, this means that the tester needs to have the capacity to understand and verify the transformed or migrated data.

And there are other trends which are also having a bearing on the future of testing software in Telecoms:

Agile Testing: Until recently the principal approach to software testing was the Waterfall or V model, Due to the scale of many projects it was not uncommon for the need for a specific product or the technology to be rendered obsolete before it was delivered. This lead to increased interest in Agile methodologies, including agile software testing, in an attempt to meet the demand for faster time to market. This change in itself has brought its own challenges in terms of managing the array of smaller agile projects and ensuring change control across the varied components, computer systems and telecom platforms.

Outsourcing quality assurance software testing: In recent years it has become popular for testing to be outsourced to offshore test factories with the aim of reduced cost and delivery timescales. The test factories provide automated regression test services which constantly run on the test environments to identify if any errors have been introduced as a result of recently delivered code.

Testing Environments: These can be complex and expensive to establish and maintain, it is common for environments to be shared by many systems and integration test teams, however this can produce a configuration management headache.