Demonstration of an Automated Integrated Testing Environment for CTI Systems

Abstract

We demonstrate the Integrated Testing Environment, ITE, an environment for automated and integrated testing at system level. A companion paper [4] describes the problem of systems integrated testing in its conceptual application modelling focus. Here and in [5], the concept's implementation is exemplified in case of automated integrated testing of a Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) system. The CTI system consists of a switch, an automatic call distributor, and a suite of applications forming a call center and supporting the tasks of a center's human agent, e.g., applications that enable an agent to log-on/log-off at the call distributor, or to initiate conference calls with other agents.In the ITE, each hardware and software component of the CTI system is controlled by its own test tool, e.g., a proprietary hardware tracer for the switch or a GUI test tool such as Rational SQA Robot [6] for the applications. Coordinating which action has to be performed by which test tool is under responsibility of the Test Coordinator, a tool built on top of METAFrame Technologies' Agent Building Center (ABC) [2], a general-purpose environment for specification and verification of complex workflows.As outlined in the following sections, the ITE supports the design of test cases including the verification of their consistency, the interactive combination of test cases resulting in test scenarios, and the execution of test cases and test scenarios in the heterogenous processing environment of CTI systems. Design Support FeaturesSystem testing is characterized by focussing on inter-components cooperation. For the design of appropriate system-level test cases it is necessary to know what features the system provides, how to operate the system in order to stimulate a feature, and how to determine if features work. This information is gathered

Library-Based Design and Consistency Checking of System-Level Industrial Test Cases

“…To give an idea of the complexity of the testing scenarios considered in practice, the concrete application already investigated in depth includes settings with a switch, up to eight phones of different nature, a complex CTI application with a server PC and a client PC serving several end-users, a running application suite, consisting of five programs, where the phones and the PC clients interact, and two test tools. The scenario is described in more detail in [9].…”