Automated Test System

Client: Telecom

Category: Quality, Knowledge Transfer, Transformation

ETHITEQUE was asked by a major telecom to help improve quality for one of their most lucrative yet highly complex, products.  They felt there were too many defects being found during their Customer Experience Test phase and asked us to “automate 1,000 test cases” to help find code problems faster.

We determined that the telecom product was too complex to simply create 1,000 cases and expect them to stand the test of time. The company would find that they would need to re-automate the test cases, over and over again.

Instead, we recommended and then designed and created an automated test system to execute thousands of System Tests based on the feature mix of the product being tested in the lab.  We then automated 1,000 test cases that could be used by the Automated Test System.

When we evaluated how the company was testing in general, we found:

• Engineers, System Testers, and Customer Experience Testers were all doing the same type of testing (which meant many types of tests were being missed).

All three groups running identical tests and these were designed for the System Test phase.  In short, they were not following best practice.

We explained why it was not, in fact, efficient to reuse the same tests across three different test phases and taught the engineers how to run developer tests:  unit and unit integration testing.  To the Customer Experience testers, we explained how to create genuine Customer Experience tests.

The automated test system (with its supporting database and 1,000 original test cases) was used by the telecom for over ten years.  The solution we built was robust and could easily accommodate new tests as their product evolved.  As well, testing practices now aligned with best practices, strengthening product quality.