User Acceptance Testing Framework based on Service Oriented Test Architecture for Telecom Charging Software Applications Landscape

Abstract

User acceptance Testing (UAT) is the final stage of testing on a software application which is developed or customized to meet specific requirements. When UAT is successful, software is considered as accepted by its indented users for live use. For over the years, many UAT frameworks have been introduced to improve the way of doing UAT. UAT framework provides set of processes, guide lines and tools which can be used to plan, design, execute, and evaluate results of user acceptance tests. However these frameworks are continuously being challenged when user acceptance test planning, designing, execution and result verification demanded collaboration, integration, global view and reuse of test cases across domains, applications, modules and teams. As these challenges are very prominent to the telecom charging applications and the limited applicability of conventional UAT frameworks in this context is led to introduce a new UAT framework for Telecom charging applications landscape. In this project the proposed user acceptance testing framework defines a user acceptance test from test service(s). Test Service is a web service which wraps contents of one or more test cases and exposes it to outside world over universal description discovery and integration registry. External users can consume the test cases in a test service using the test service client which provides functionalities to search test service providers, view available test cases in a test service and link the required test cases in test service into the local repository. The UAT test case tool is a web based GUI tool which integrates the functionalities of the UAT framework and provides the functionalities to design test cases, design UAT test cases, design test suites and execute UAT test cases. The ability to copy and enhance the existing test service test cases as a new version is a key feature of the tool which enables the evolvement of test cases. In overall both UAT tool and the framework provide sound platform for user acceptance test teams to collaborate, reuse and further enhance the test cases during the user acceptance testing process. The results of the live use of the system were promising and showed satisfactory results.