A novel test creation framework for value-added services

Recent years have witnessed that standard telecommunication services evolved more and more to complex value-added services. This fact is accompanied by a change of service characteristics as new services are designed to fulfil the customer's demands instead of just focusing on technologies and protocols. Besides, service providers have to consider a fast transition from concept to market product as well as low prices for new services due to the increasing competition in the telecommunication industry. So, there is an urgent need for effective test solutions that can be integrated into current value-added service development life-cycles. This paper proposes a novel framework for functional testing which is based on a new sort of specification for value-added services, the Service Test Description (STD). Combined with the properties of predefined reusable test modules based on Statecharts notation, an algorithm parses STD instances and automatically generates so-called behaviour models from which functional test cases can be derived, generated and subsequently executed against the value-added service. Prototypical implementations of the concept have confirmed its usefulness and effectiveness.