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The Telecoms industry is under tremendous change to deliver reliable, secure innovative services and products that constantly improve performance and deliver a flexible, reliable cost effective solution for the end users.
30 years ago the primary challenge for telcoms in the UK mainland was to deliver basic telephony services for fixed line phones. However since privatisation and the introduction of competition into the UK market in the mid 80's, coupled with the arrival of technological leaps such as Mobile, Broadband, Internet, Cable TV, and Online television services (IPTV), the challenges have increased immensely. All this change has moved the telecoms sector a long way towards the ultimate goal of convergence of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).
The telecomms industry is constantly competing for increased speed and bandwidth. The recently published government interim report into Digital Britain' by Lord Carter, includes a 22 point action plan which outlines the government's strategy for the UK's digital transformation, along with the upgrading and modernising of all wired, wireless and broadband infrastructure and making broadband available to every house in Britain by 2012. It also highlights the strategic importance that the telecommunications industry plays in the future of UK PLC and the need for Superfast' connectivity in order to keep the UK in the forefront of the telecoms revolution and to gain competitive advantage by doing so.
So what does this mean for telecoms testing?
In order to understand the specific challenges for the testing community one first needs to understand 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, which perform and function in the desired manner.
Larger telecoms companies are moving towards a simple Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that has an emphasis on reusability in order to deliver a consistent customer experience.
It is apparent that the tester must possess skills and experience beyond the ability to write and execute tests. This is because of the varied range of functional areas (listed below) that telecoms testing encompasses.
Billing
Customer Relation Management (CRM)
Service provision and repair (also known as lead to cash' and lead to fix')
Collaborations - with other licensed operators (OLO's)
Technical Domain and Network access areas.
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 (Voice over IP) applications
Banking applications
However it is unlikely that one lone tester would hold the experience to cover all of these functions. The tester must communicate effectively as it is imperative that they can converse throughout the Software Development Life Cycle with various parties throughout the different test phases such as in waterfall:
System testing
Integration testing
End to End (E2E) testing
Acceptance testing
User Acceptance (UAT) testing
Regression testing
Non functional testing - such as Load and performance
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.
Until recently the established industry approach to testing was Waterfall or V model but due to the large size of many projects it became common for the need for a specific product or the technology to be obsolete by the time of Go Live. This has lead to the adoption of Agile methodologies, 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 vast number of smaller agile projects and ensuring co-ordination and integration of changes across the varied components, systems and platforms. For example it is quite common for there to be a strong interdependency on data transferred around the systems a small change to a data filed in component A could lead to exceptional amounts of regression testing in components B' C' D' and E' which all needs to be co-ordinated for each short agile cycle.
Test environments 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.
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.
In summary
There are many exciting challenges ahead for the teleco's industry, with the consumer expecting better, faster innovative services and UK PLC depending on the successful realisation of greater business efficiency and the ability to export newly developed technologies. However it is clear that it is not possible to achieve any of these benefits unless the new services products and technological advancements are tested to ensure that they meet the high standard expected from consumers and the wider business community.
Mark Trellis is an experienced software testing consultant working in the UK in the Telecoms arena. He is a consultant with Acutest, an independent company providing assurance services.
For further information visit: http://www.acutest.co.uk
Disclaimer: All information on this site is provided for informational purposes only! By no means is any
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