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Testing Enterprise Middleware for Mobile Phone Service
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Telecommunications |
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A large telecommunications firm offers mobile phone service as part of its service offering. Behind the service is
an enterprise-level middleware implementation through which all administrative and billing functions pass. So, for
example, new account creation, activation, equipment ordering, billing plans and billing transactions all flow
through the middleware. Some 15 front-end applications use services provided by the middleware, and all
communications are conducted by XML over HTTP. There are over 300 types of XML conversations that can occur, with
thousands of variations, and new messages are added regularly. Testing is currently done by “manual” submission of
ad-hoc XML requests, followed by verification of response XMLs by eye. The software quality team needs a tool to
automate the testing of these XML request/response pairs. |
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How can a large volume of XML request/response pairs be
tested efficiently against enterprise-level
middleware services?
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Design and build a custom XML test messaging tool
that allows selection of data, combinations of messages,
and comparisons of response messages to bona fide
response baselines.
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RTTS built a customized messaging tool
utilizing Microsoft HTTP components for
response/request messaging of the middleware
layer.
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The messaging tool permits the user to
set up sequences of messages, and to correlate
the data between responses and downstream requests,
so that the response to one request can be used
as data in a follow-up request.
The tool also implements a data verification system,
in which response messages are compared to a set of
“gold-standard” baseline responses.
By the end of development, almost 400 types of XML
messages were entered into the XML test messaging tool.
This gives the software quality team the flexibility to
design volume tests consisting of large numbers of
messages, and to execute those tests every time a middleware
component is released. In addition, it provides flexibility
to add new messages, so that the tool message library can
adapt to changes to the middleware.
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Hours of error-prone work
reduced to minutes.
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The tool data verification functionality
avoids the human error factor that inevitably
occurs when XML is tested by eye.
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Using a tool-based approach
provides a standard library of
properly customized messages to
send into the middleware; the
vagaries of ad-hoc testing are avoided.
Broad testing coverage is attained
for the multiple applications that
use middleware services.
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