Integrating Quality Assurance into OSS/BSS Development for Telcos

Telecom Business Review | Monday, June 26, 2023

Telecommunication companies are under pressure to adapt to changing customer needs.

FREMONT, CA: Telecom companies must adapt to changing customer needs. The road to product diversification remains rocky, however. McKinsey reports that 77 percent of telecom leaders have undertaken five or more business-building initiatives over the last decade. Yet, only half of them admit that their initiatives are already profitable.

The lack of technological know-how and long software development and testing cycles often hinder progress. Faster OSS or BSS product releases depend on quality assurance (QA).

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The Increased Role of QA in Telecom

Telecom testing has traditionally focused on routing protocol testing. Stable operations and high customer satisfaction depend on secure, low-latency data transmissions between networks. SIP and SS7 protocols were also prioritized for testing as hackers increasingly targeted them.

Telecom sector digitalization has transformed how it functions "under the hood" significantly. The leading companies in the market not only provide connectivity services—voice calls, SMS, Internet—but also offer an array of digital products and services, including cloud-native open-source software apps, OTT media services, mobile money services, cloud storage, email accounts, and on-demand private networks, as well as IoT products and services.

Digital and customer-facing offerings require a more comprehensive quality assurance process. Tests improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn, according to 93 percent of telecom leaders. Yet, far fewer software releases are bug-free from the beginning.

Telecom companies have traditionally used manual testing methods for networks and software and have hesitated to adopt DevOps best practices. The quality gates of CI/CD pipelines are continuous, automated testing.

Today, telecoms must create new software faster, release product updates more frequently, and ensure top-of-the-line security against ever-changing threats.

Most companies will need to make a critical shift from "traditional" providers to "digital-first" providers—and this shift will require rethinking the way they develop and test software.

Practices for Agile QA in Telecoms

Analyze baseline test results

Testing automation solves a problem (long and complex bug detection), not a problem in a nutshell. It is, therefore, essential to understand what issues the telecom companies are trying to prevent and protect against before automating.

The telecom industry suffers from "legacy code" and custom-built OSS and BSS systems that are hard to maintain and easy to break when introducing new components. Adding any new code to such a "shaky" base is risky unless the new code can immediately be tested for its impact on other system elements.

The best outcomes from QA automation come from analyzing system requirements. First, a telecom-oriented QA Analyst studies data flows, reliability, security, and performance requirements. Test scenarios based on telecom domain knowledge cover common user behaviors and critical characteristics of the system performance.

Telecom companies map optimal testing scenarios based on initial analysis and suggest required test types. Next, the team decides which scenarios should be automated.

Build a pyramid of test automation

Agile test automation pyramids are schematic representations of various automated tests layered on top of one another. A model based on speed and impact on end-product quality organizes test types into three layers.

Test pyramids include unit tests at the base. Tests help ensure that individual pieces of source code (software components) are suitable for use in the application, i.e., they do not interfere with existing functionality or other aspects of the architecture.

The next stage consists of integration tests, which examine each software module as a group for compatibility with certain functional requirements (business rules, authentication standards, authorization configurations, etc.).

The final step is to test the entire product in close to real-world situations with an end-to-end test (E2E).

What are the benefits of using a testing pyramid and continuous testing principles?

Identifying and fixing critical software defects early in the development cycle is crucial. It prevents costly code reworks and production bugs that require extra operational support and can result in app downtime. Developers will have more time to improve the product's functionality and ship new features rather than addressing bugs from the past. QA engineers and developers find it easier to interpret test cases when they "sit" near the code. The newcomer will be able to get up to speed much faster this way. Continuous testing encourages developers to write "clean code" with fewer dependencies on other system features. Clean code is easier to maintain, understand, and reuse for different system components. The building and shipping of bug-free software become standard when everything is unified.

The telecom industry should also make Test Automation a vital part of the Definition of Done (DoD)—a criterion for software acceptance.

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