Case Study

5. QUALITY - Wireless Roaming Clearing Service System Testing

Customer
The customer is one of the largest telecommunication corporations in the world. They developed a new RADIUS protocol software named Clearing Service System which enables user roaming between the networks of different Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISP) and also provides transaction clearing.

Challenge
The Clearing Service is a very complex system with many components. QA engineers were required to be familiar with telecommunication networking configuration concepts and have the understanding of database management systems, NAS and RADIUS servers.

As the Clearing Service System was developed by the customer, we were not familiar with the architecture and operation of the entire system. The test cases provided by the customer were simply check lists without detailed testing steps defined. The project also required ArcherMind engineers to learn new and unfamiliar technologies such as RADIUS protocol, the FreeBSD operating system, PostgreSQL databases and the Perl script language.

Service Delivered
The ArcherMind team learned the new technologies for the project before the kick off date for the project. Knowledge was developed in RADIUS protocol RFC files, Perl language, Linux and PSQL database.

A clear conception of the whole system definition was developed through interactive sessions with the customer. This enabled the creation of clear testing steps. ArcherMind set up a detailed test strategy and methods, which proved to be crucial to the success of the project. This included protocol testing, designing a new test client, launching scripts to simulate real users to send request packets and checking server log files and databases to verify the system response and performance. Frequent and clear communications existed on the project team and with the customer to be sure that issues and testing procedure were well understood. This project has presented a new learning experience for ArcherMind and has enabled us now to support additional customers who need networking protocol testing.