Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Jan. 25, 2010

It is estimated that most wireless providers today consume about ten times more bandwidth than they did in 2007. With demand for high-speed wireless growing on MIDs (mobile Internet devices), every major wireless carrier in the U.S. and abroad will soon need to offer 4G technology to remain competitive, and at the same time provide a strong and resilient network to all its subscribers.

But moving to 4G technology does present some challenges driven by a growing network complexity, higher customer expectations and tougher market competition.

In light of these problems, test automation is no longer an option for mobile service carriers seeking to bring quality products and services to market quickly.

In addition to increased network complexity, testers need to be concerned about application performance. With 4G technology, wireless users expect easy access to everything from Twitter to e-mail to video from their wireless devices.

As a result of all this, consumers will be judging service quality based on application performance rather than traditional phone service.

Wireless carriers will consequently need to increase their testing requirements by an order of magnitude to deliver the high application performance consumers demand. Many service providers still rely on manual testing practices, but this approach cannot effectively scale to meet 4G testing requirements.

Overall, new 4G infrastructure equipment is far more complex than what mobile carriers have today. And the inefficiencies inherent in manual processes make it difficult for teams to handle the volume and complexity of testing required by 4G.

Often these organizations hire more testers as device complexity increases, but this provides only short-term relief and has proven to be an expensive and unsustainable solution.

To efficiently solve these many issues, mobile carriers and device manufacturers will need to optimize their quality processes. Automated testing can help them work together more efficiently and release high-quality products and services on a 4G network.

Automated testing tools enable users to standardize test assets — from setup procedures to interoperability testing and final results analysis, and then share these common assets within a single testing organization and with partner organizations.

Device manufacturers and carriers can create test assets that they can easily share with each other, modify, and use throughout the quality process.

Meanwhile, innovation is pushing for shorter delays. With new mobile handsets released about every 3 to 6 months, and new roll outs for wireless carriers performed every three to four years, testing teams are struggling to keep pace with development.

Time-intensive manual testing is putting organizations at risk of falling behind competitors and releasing products or services with quality issues. Without high-quality connections and high-speed network access, wireless carriers won't be able to deliver 4G QoS (Quality of Service).

If a carrier runs the same tests as the device manufacturer but with different results, the carrier can quickly determine that the problem is a setup issue, and not a hardware problem. Once the device is producing the expected results, the wireless carrier can begin interoperability testing, and, if any problems arise, send the test back to the device manufacturer.

This allows the handset manufacturer to see what was failing and in what context, and recreate the problem.

Test automation offers organizations a way to work more efficiently to meet growing testing requirements and shorter deadlines, while delivering the quality customers expect. But home-grown automation solutions are not ideal for testing next-generation devices and networks.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Source: M&CNS.