Behaviour Driven Testing

Before activating new services for end customers, we need to know that everything is working correctly and not to cause bad first impression of your product. In virtualized world achieving optimal quality of service requires continuous testing of the service itself and its underlying resources. Testing should be performed in all phases during the service lifecycle including: VNF onboarding, service design, and eventually service deployment. High level of automation is required to make this feasible with realistic amount of resources.

Stratoss contains an integrated test framework module facilitating automated service testing. With SLM you can define applicable test scenarios within the VNF packages and service models. SLM’s test framework utilises the defined scenarios and automates the execution of those as an integral part of each step during service lifecycle.

Every time you onboard a new VNF or a new version of an existing VNF to SLM it is automatically verified against the defined test scenarios to secure it is correct working and implementation of the required lifecycle operations.

Similarly, testing and verification is made an integrated step of service design process. Each time a new service design is made available it is tested to be structurally correct and more importantly that it behaves as expected. Behavioural testing is performed in pre-production environment before accepting new service models to production. The method of performing behavioural tests in non-production environment without real customer traffic is to first model a set of test resources, like traffic generators and probes, to be used as part of test setup. These test resources are used as part of the test scenario together with the service under test itself. SLM’s test framework automatically triggers the defined test scenarios including spinning up test environment, instantiating the service under test and necessary test resources, running defined test sequences, and finally reporting the results.

Eventually, when a service is accepted to production environment and instantiated to an end customer, its accessibility and quality should be verified before the final activation. With SLM this ready for service testing is triggered automatically as a step of service activation process. This ensures that the service instance is working also with customer specific parameters and in customer’s selected locations before opening the service for customer traffic.

SLM’s integrated test framework and its automated behavioural testing capabilities offers you:

• Better quality of service offered to end customers
• Less time and effort spent on testing
• Less time and effort spent on troubleshooting and fixing issues