Table of Contents:

Definition and Overview

1. ATM Layer Testing

2. Stages of Testing ATM Products

3. Signaling over ATM

4. Automated Testing

5. Testing Deployment of ATM Services

6. LANE over ATM

7. Summary

Self-Test

Glossary

PDF of this tutorial

To ensure the highest quality product, complete system verification must be performed many times before a product can be released to manufacturing for delivery to customers. Quality assurance teams must quickly detect the existence of any problems and ensure that corrective measures are taken. The efficiency of this process can have a dramatic influence on time to market.

The increasing complexity of communications standards (i.e., ATM service classes) now greatly exceeds the capacity for manually performing comprehensive product and systems testing. New testing standards are published on a regular basis, and only the most experienced ATM designers and software engineers are capable of conducting these tests and correctly interpreting the results.

Drawbacks to Manual Testing
The traditional method of question-and-answer (QA) testing is for a team to manually verify each step of an approved step-by-step test procedure. This method of manual testing is insufficient for the following reasons:

• The best resources in a corporation should be responsible for the product quality. However, these same resources are typically also required for product design and development and troubleshooting complex problems that are detected during testing.
• Regression test phases must be efficient to quickly discover any problems to be fixed and retested before release. Each testing cycle for complex test phases manually may take weeks or more—introducing a corresponding delay in the final product release date.
• Each regression test phase must retest all product functions—not just those functions identified to have been affected by the most recent product software and hardware modifications. Quality assurance groups may reduce the scope of testing in later phases to reduce the time required for testing. Reduced testing results in missed defects and lower product quality.
• Testing technicians become distracted while repeating the same actions many times during successive test phases. This results in missed defects and lower product quality.
  
• Testing technicians and test authors understand what input is logical and will perform tests accordingly. These actions will miss many defects caused by illogical input that will be entered by mistake or by less knowledgeable users.
  

Automated Testing Solutions
Automated testing offers solutions to these and other problems:

• Automated test suites operate with minimum manual intervention, allowing expert resources time to build test procedures that verify all necessary functions that the product should perform.
  
• Automated tests are proven to reduce the time required for testing. New tools are constantly being introduced to author and manage automated test platforms.
  
• Once an automated test suite is written, the entire test cycle can be repeated in a fraction of the time required for manual testing. This will ensure that important tests are not skipped due to time constraints.
  
• Automated tests run every test—every time—in a predictable manner. Automated tests do not become distracted or inconsistent.
  
• Automated tests can be programmed to test using inconsistent/illogical input values or selection sequences triggering the system error conditions. This will test the operator-tolerance level of the system.
  

The prime advantages for product developers using automated testing is that it becomes practical to develop and perform adequate and accurate regression testing throughout the entire product development phase.