Introduction
The pandemic and various world crises have significantly disrupted customer behavior in the past few years. The worldwide epidemic has compelled the telecommunications sector to make rapid modifications while testing teams have been putting out flames left and right. The telecom industry’s significance to global development, wealth, and innovation cannot be emphasized. Statistics show that around 1.33 Trillion USD was spent on telecom services by the IT sector (largest by revenue being AT&T). Although the digital transformation was previously a strategic focus in this business, COVID-19 has highlighted its significance and advantages. It is necessary to improve customer experience by creating a smooth, digital omnichannel experience. To accomplish such goals, we need to provide a much-needed improvement to the present segregated, disconnected business system infrastructure: a replacement. Telecom testing tools enable us to analyze, monitor, and perform wireless network drive testing. Available telecom testing tools fulfill different objectives (we’ll discuss later in this blog).
Estimated Global telecom services spending forecast from 2018-24Â
Importance of Testing in Telecoms
Customers today demand rapid tailored services in real-time, thanks to the increasing digitization of services. However, telecom firms handle IT in a complicated manner, impeding digital maturity. Their old monolithic systems do not provide clients with an innovative and seamless experience. You might think – How can you keep your business running while transitioning disconnected and segregated customer channels into omnichannel systems? You are not wrong. The digital transformation of a Business Support System (BSS) is a long and continual journey that requires regular monitoring from all sides.
Testing guarantees that all business-critical systems and procedures are functioning with perfection. The following are the most typical procedures tested in the telecoms industry:
- CRM and ERP
- Management of orders and fraud
- Customer example
- Network administration
- MediationÂ
- Provisioning
- Revenue guaranteeÂ
- EAIÂ
- billing
- Data storage and retrieval
When discussing the importance of testing in telco, we need to be aware of the telecom testing tools and understand their functioning well enough to use them when necessary.Â
Below(in the chart) have discussed a few telecom testing tools you can use in your testing journey.
| TELECOM TESTING TOOLS | PURPOSE |
| Nethawk | SS7 protocol testing |
| Etherpeek | IP testing |
| Abacus5000 | SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) testing |
| TMS (Test Mobile System) | Analyze, monitor, and perform wireless network drive testing |
| CNT(Communication Network Tester) | Swift recognition of terminals and rescuing many terminals |
| Glomosim Simulator | Simulates wireless and wired network systems |
Quality Assurance in Telecom Industry
Monolithic core IT systems of telcos provide a significant problem for QA teams. End-user behavior must be anticipated and balanced against the needs of each business domain by testers. It entails developing tactics that cover as much of the product as feasible while remaining within schedule and budget restrictions. Furthermore, because of the intricate maze of legacy systems and procedures, most telcos have separate teams working on and testing the various business areas. It results in segregated testing teams that lack communication and collaboration. These teams primarily evaluate the functioning of each of the systems involved in those business processes, but they do not test the business processes from the standpoint of your end-user. This strategy jeopardizes the user’s omnichannel experience and business continuity, potentially leading to catastrophic financial losses. This is why you need quality assurance in the telecom industry.
Telecom Automation & Software Testing
The Telecom industry’s extremely complicated infrastructure, paired with a broad business scope (by definition), implies that manual testing soon accumulates and becomes unmanageable. The transition being lengthy enough, those activities need consideration.
The prominent place to start is by automating the testing of a large software replacement. Test automation improves test coverage, agility, and efficiency. These, in turn, reduce the duration of the test cycle while boosting the quality of a company’s digital environment, resulting in a shorter time to market.
Automation would allow faster detection and resolution, resulting in lower customer turnover. For example, a telecommunications operator may make a portion of its broadband service diagnostic platform available online to identify and rectify service faults as fast as possible. It is critical to test this system and its integrations to ensure client satisfaction and business retention. However, if the defects are not found and repaired soon enough, the company’s reputation may suffer.
However, most test automation solutions on the market today are designed with a programming mindset which means that even technologies that claim to be codeless require testers to know code to some level.
The issue is that code-based automation does not assist in resolving the communication issues that telecom testing teams face. If this is the case, it will simply exacerbate the situation. This is because only a restricted number of specialists, those with programming skills, can create automation. Programmers are a costly resource, absent in the QA domain for many firms. This establishes a reliance between testers and developers, adding degrees of complexity.
If you want to establish efficient end-to-end testing, you must discover a system that allows testing teams to collaborate(and test automation).
Due to their collaborative and business-centric nature, a no-code automation testing platform is a superior alternative for telecoms.
Is No-Code Automation a Fit for Telco Software Testing?
For end-to-end test automation that is fast, scalable, and delivers quick results. This gives a more accessible automation possibility from a business owner’s standpoint. It moves from a technology-only strategy focused on frameworks, technologies, and atomic objects requiring code to operate to a task-driven business approach, where understanding business processes, rules, and applications are the focal point. This new strategy essentially adjusts the abilities and competencies required for automation. By removing programming expertise from the equation, more individuals with varied skillsets – including development, data, testing, application, and business – can collaborate to build automation. Additional jobs and skillsets become available and relevant for automation success. More significantly, it creates automation partly independent of developer resources. It is a critical differential since the skills and expertise required for code-based automation are the primary hurdles stopping firms from implementing effective, operational, and scalable automation.
Steps to Adopting Automation in Telco
The decision to take a business-centric approach to automation should not imply that firms must compromise on automation capabilities. When evaluating automation alternatives, it is critical to verify the validity of:
- Cross-functional coverage: Organizational business verticals (Sales, manufacturing, resource management, warehouse, and logistics.)
- Web, desktop-based, virtual, and legacy applications are all supported.
- Complete coverage: This is especially important in the case of telecoms, given the diverse application space.
- Advanced data parameterization, processing, and transformation capabilities.
With these capabilities in situ and available in a codeless and business-user-oriented manner, automated validation of any business process in the context of the BSS is possible and should be included in the transformation time frame. The capacity to incorporate and ultimately assign automation ownership to business resources will considerably increase the ability to use automation without sacrificing delivery capabilities.
Conclusion
HeadSpin collaborates with telcos and significant enterprises worldwide to monitor and enhance 5G user experience, OTT streaming experience, test data, and messaging services, confirm device compatibility, and deploy software at the edge. Headspin’s automation testing platform allows you to test and debug mobile, web, audio, and video applications on thousands of devices across the globe.
- In each HeadSpin appliance, the company installed an on-premises solution with iOS and Android mobile phones. These units were installed in three distinct home networks in the United States.
- A comprehensive picture of application, device, and network performance is noted. Edge assessment assessed how long it would take to download and watch a big file (for example, a movie file) at median download speed—on 5G when available and on LTE when 5G is not available.
