TesLA Alliance Blog

All the market trends in the network operator ecosystem are driving systems complexity up and time to market down.

Executives ask why can’t we shorten the test cycles for important revenue-producing products and services and in the next breath take measure of our quality. “We must ship quality products!”

So it’s time to go back to the drawing board and look at the metrics, X number of Test Engineers, Y number of Test Cases…how can both operators and their varied vendors optimize our test resources? Reduce cycle times? Ensure quality and reduce risk?

TesLA was founded by a number of industry leaders with the goal of automating all the pieces of the testing lifecycle. Plan the correct level of test coverage, author the test cases and device configurations, build the test harness, and regression test suites.

The goal is to run complete regression tests of your development systems daily with new Engineering builds. When a test fails, the set up and results are captured and stored for expedited remediation but test management harness continues with the next test case.

When operators and vendor developers automate their script authoring, test libraries, lab management and device configuration, the velocity of your test cycles with double if not triple. Developers will have all the right information to replicate the bugs faster and get the fixes done the same day ready for the next regression cycle that night.

So if the business case is this strong and automation is a no brainer, why is it not all around us? Answer: Lack of standards. Complexity of increasingly intelligent VoIP, IPTV and other NGN applications that combine many dynamic communication components. Fragmented efforts. Competition at the cost of customer satisfaction.

The only way to change the shortfall from a lack of automation in both the vendor software development lifecycle and operator service deployment cycle is an industry wide, neutral alliance trying to define and commit to certain standards. That would remove the foremost obstacle to an automation tool which can do and achieve all of the business goals listed above.

TesLA represents a broad ecosystem effort for the Network Test and measurement industry. A common test automation standards alliance like TesLa will allow anyone including your test team to build test harnesses and management systems with tools from multiple vendors – including the leverage of their own existing scripts. This will reduce the workload of learning to use multiple separate tools and APIs.

Automation projects pay off with lower TCO and better testing ROI when you can simultaneously reduce test cycle times by weeks and improve product quality out the door.

Neal Roche

nroche@teslaalliance.org

Tags: TesLa Alliance, Test Automation

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Test Automation Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.