Telecom testing - any tool integration and use of test frameworks?

Question

Telecom testing is an interesting niche area, and you either use expensive commercial tool solutions, or open source solutions to do testing (e.g. SIPp), but they're not always one-size-fits-all.

I was wondering if anyone has done telecom testing that involved integrating different tools (ideally not from same vendor) and/or integrate with test frameworks for keyword/data driven testing or BDD. Obviously tools like Empirix Hammer, Spirent, and SIPp don't necessarily offer these framework features for example. If anyone has done such integration work, would love to hear their experiences. A blog post of it would be awesome.

Answer 1

You should separate the test framework from the equipment or tool you are using, this can be easily done if you refer to the test equipment through drivers.

Test equipment manufacturers usually supply a well documented API for their solutions. You can then use those as a Drivers from within any test framework.

For example I used, or heard about others using, Spirent solutions (they supply API in TCL, Perl, Java, Ruby and C) from:

• Excel VBA,
• coronys ETS,
• JSYSTEM by top-q, formerly AQUA,
• Perl code,
• TCL code
• and others.