Why Telecom Companies Choose testRigor For Automated Testing

Introduction

The global telecom industry has increased from $2,868.37 billion in 2022 to a whopping $3,041.8 billion in 2023, at a CAGR of 6.0%, and is projected to increase further.

Like any other digital industry, telecom runs on software. The telecom processes are complex due to underlying components such as network switches, routers, video, and voice communication. The supporting software processes should be top-notch, considering the telecom domain’s growth, impact, and market. And this highlights the indispensable role of software testing in fully supporting the complex telecom infrastructure and operations.

This article will talk about how testRigor can be instrumental in automating your telecom product testing.

Which Testing is Crucial for Telecom?

Unit Testing

There are numerous components in the complex telecom workflow. Unit tests are required to confirm that these components work fine in isolation. A few examples are:

• Call Processing: Testing functions such as call setup, call recording, etc.
• Message Handling: Validation of functions around routing messages in the network
• Network Configuration: Test functions that configure network settings and associated parameters

How does testRigor Help?

Below are a few features of testRigor that are incredibly helpful in performing telecom product unit testing:

Phone Call Testing

testRigor’s phone call testing-related features ease the unit testing for you. Use Twilio integration and write your phone call-related tests in plain English. As mentioned below, you can check if the call was picked up, answered, completed, rang, etc. Isn’t it super easy?

call "+15344297154" and validate it was picked up

See more examples here.

SMS Testing

Using testRigor, you can send phone messages, validate, and even store SMS content. You can implement 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) using the SMS testing capability of testRigor.

send sms to "+15344297154" with content "this is content"

See more SMS testing examples using testRigor here.

Login Support

Validate the login unit of the application on mobile and web easily using testRigor’s built-in login support. The complex login feature is handled automatically by testRigor using its login command.

login
click "My Bills"
scroll down
click "View Phone Bill"
check that page contains "Pay Now"

Integration Testing

Next on the cards is to validate that individual components are interacting with each other effortlessly. These components can be messaging components, call components, billing systems, APIs, database connections, message queues, etc.

Example: Test the integration between the call processing components and the billing system to ensure that the call records are accurately logged and billed to the customer.

How does testRigor help?

testRigor’s features help you run integration tests on your telecom application without hassle. Below are a few of the valuable features:

API Testing

Employ testRigor’s API testing to test the API connections of your telecom product. Use API mocking to cover below use cases:

• Use mocking APIs if you are using third-party API calls. Those calls can be charged and expensive, so you can mock the responses instead of calling the real service.
• Test your application individually if servers are unstable or down.
• Test specific scenarios, for example, if you want to test a scenario where the server returns an error.

call api post "http://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/create" with headers "Content-Type:application/json" and "Accept:application/json" and body "{\"name\":\"James\",\"bill\":\"123\",\"phone\":\"3226152\"}" and get "$.data.name" and save it as "createdName" and then check that http code is 200

Database Testing

You can connect to specific external databases through a JDBC driver and execute commands directly from your tests. It’s possible to configure more than one connection. testRigor supports the most popular databases, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Snowflake, and GridGain.

Use SQL commands to retrieve, insert, update, and delete rows in the test steps.

Example: run sql query “insert into Users(UserID, FirstName, LastName) values (3, ‘Jon’, ‘Doe’);”

End-to-End Testing

Testing the entire application flow from customer sign-up to billing is extremely important because multiple complex individual systems are involved.

Example: Test the entire customer onboarding process, including creating a new account, verifying user details, placing a call successfully, then billing the customer based on the subscriptions or plans.

How does testRigor help?

testRigor is designed to handle your end-to-end testing needs single-handedly. Below are a few of the capabilities:

Versatile End-to-End Test Creation

testRigor helps you to quicken the complex E2E testing process through its intelligent AI-powered workflows. You can create your end-to-end tests through three easy approaches:

1. Provide only the test case title and testRigor’s generative AI engine automatically creates test steps for you within seconds.
2. testRigor helps to write the test scripts in plain English by eliminating the prerequisite to know any programming language. testRigor’s AI converts the English test scripts to actual code using advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP).
3. Use our test recorder to record your actions and create the test case easily. Tests are also generated in plain English, making them seamless to edit and debug at any time.. The absence of XPath dependency ensures ultra-stable tests that are easy to maintain.

It empowers the whole team to write end-to-end UI tests quickly and efficiently. Seamlessly create, edit, and update tests of any complexity, allowing the team to expand test coverage rapidly.

File Testing

A standard end-to-end test validation will verify the customer’s bill in a pdf file. testRigor allows you to download files, including PDFs, CSVs, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and more. You can then check that it is successfully downloaded. Further, check the file’s contents to complete your E2E test case.

check that file "bill.pdf" was downloaded
check that downloaded file "bill.pdf" contains "Amount Due"

Email Testing

testRigor supports testing of sending, receiving, and validating emails. You can also test sending emails with attachments, which is beneficial for testing bill dispatch scenarios.

send email from "[email protected]" to "[email protected]" with subject "Test Bill", and body "Hi, Attached is your Bill.", and attachment from saved value "Bill File"

User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

UAT tests the specified business requirements and user expectations based on the acceptance criteria. Actual end-users or stakeholders typically carry it out to ensure the software application is ready to release in the production environment.

Example: The user account management testing involves user registration, login, and account management features such as subscription selection, plan updates, etc.

How does testRigor Help?

testRigor is loaded with many capabilities that ease your UAT testing process. Here we list a few of them.

Generate Unique Test Data

Use testRigor’s in-built features to generate unique test data such as name, email, phone number, date/time, Google authenticator code, and many more.

generate unique email, then enter into "Email" and save as "newEmail"

Reusable Rules (Subroutines)

Test steps that are used often and repeatedly in tests define them once as reusable rules providing a name. Then use only the subroutine’s name to invoke all the reusable test steps in any other test case.

In the example below, the test steps related to adding a broadband subscription in written in the ‘subscribe’ subroutine. In the actual test case, mentioning the reusable rules’ names will invoke all the related test steps.

subscribe
check page contains "Broadband"

Geolocation Testing

To simulate that the device is moving through geolocation coordinates, you can use testRigor’s feature.

set geo location "40.7128,74.0060"

Compare Elements

You can compare elements like images, buttons, and texts with a stored value, previous version, or file at the URL. The below example compares the logo image on UI with a baselined(stored) logo image allowing only a 5% discrepancy.

compare image of "logo" to stored value "logoFile" with allowance of "5%"

Visual Testing

You can verify visual changes on the screen using the compare command. The below example compares the current screenshot with the previous version of the test run.

compare screenshot to previous version

Cross-platform and Cross-browser Testing

Testing the application on different platforms, devices, and operating systems is vital to ensure consistent functionality and user experience across various environments.

Example: Test audio call quality and clarity on different devices and operating systems.

How does testRigor Help?

Use testRigor’s cross-platform testing capabilities on the web and mobile seamlessly. It supports web testing on desktop and mobile across 3,000+ combinations of browsers and devices on multiple operating systems, for instance, Internet Explorer on Windows and Safari on Mac and iOS. Facilitates mobile testing, including testing on physical devices through our partners, as well as testing hybrid apps.

Audio Testing

You can test audio by recording it and comparing it with another recording in the same test or an external file under load conditions to check the quality of the audio. (Audio testing is currently available for Linux/Ubuntu devices only). Read more here.

check that audio from "my-recording" is "70%" similar to "my-specific-recording"

CRM and ERP System Testing

CRM and ERP systems are inseparable components in telecom application testing. When executed manually, having the required test coverage is impossible. Automation testing is the answer to this problem. However, the legacy automation tools require enormous effort and cost with maintenance overload.

Example: Test how the telecom application handles errors or exceptions that may arise during interactions with the CRM and ERP systems, ensuring graceful handling and recovery.

How does testRigor Help?

Intelligent automation tools such as testRigor solve this massive problem in seconds. It supports testing ERP systems such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, NetSuite, WorkDay, Zenscale, and more through built-in integration with these systems.

Automatic Handling of Wait Times

testRigor resolves the errors and exceptions in the software under test by automatically managing wait times, sparing you from manually inputting them and thus preventing “element not found” errors.

How IDT, a Fortune 1000 Company Did It

IDT switched to testRigor for their automation testing and was able to achieve results that they previously thought were impossible.

Conclusion

The Telecom domain comes with its share of challenges. Diverse network configuration, huge data volume, new updates in technology, cross-platform compatibility, and complex call and messaging routing are a few of them. Manual testing fails to empower the telecom domain compared to its automated counterpart. Automation tools are essential to streamline complex telecom processes, deliver higher-quality software applications, and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving industry.

Are your testers not well-versed in the telecom domain? And domain experts on the team do not know how to write test cases.

No problem! Resolve this bottleneck with testRigor’s generative AI-empowered test case generation. Your domain experts need just to provide the test case title, and our intelligent tool will automatically generate all the test steps within seconds. Use your team’s capabilities in the correct problem area.

The benefits of automation testing in the telecom domain are increased efficiency, test coverage, software quality, flexibility, and scalability. testRigor provides these capabilities being a single solution to all automation testing requirements. It readily integrates with CI/CD pipelines, immensely reducing cost, effort, human errors, and time-to-market.