M&I Test Tools offer a Ratescanner and Testcreator, helping fully automate testing for Billing Event Processing. A Ratescanner and Testcreator with internal Product Catalogue provide a fully flexible customizing.
Various benefits such as cost reduction, revenue growth, time to market improve ments and quality gains will provide a fast and continuous amortisation of M&I Test Tools.
Enhanced rating test automation provides faster analyses, keeps test coverage con- sistently high and reduces business risk.
CDR Manipulator decodes ASN files to structured text and allows either individual or mass changes by prede- fined values in the automatic mode. After file manipulation, encoder creates a new CDR test file. Adaptation of CDR test files for next cycle are done in few minutes.
Detail Product description
Performing accurate Billing Event Processing tests can be expensive and time consuming for every operator specially without any Test Tools. Checks are required for each new service, price plan or change in the Billing System. These tests often require large amounts of manual work, including locating relevant Call-Detail-Records (CDRs) and performing the actual check. In addition to wasting resources, such manual activity is often troublesome and prone to errors.
Management&Information’s (M&I) Test Tools help operators rationalize the test process significantly. With our advanced Ratescanner billing tables will be automatically checked by the integrated tool’s Product Catalogue. A Testcreator as part of Test Tools offers a variety of automated test scenarios, enabling operators to locate missing CDR files, identify faulty records and wrong pricing quickly and easily. It provides manipulation, generating and extracting for any CDR file format, including encoded formats as TAP or GSM.
Benefits
Testing cost reduction – saving costs by automation of all manual tasks for adapting any CDR format to test customers / test environment as well as for guiding, rating and checking results.
Revenue growth – helps to find and eliminate errors that have not been detected so far in your live system by increasing the test coverage to nearly 100% of any possible call scenario and pricing scheme.
Revenue assurance – helps detecting lost or aborted chargeable CDRs in your live system
Process simplification – enables a redesign of testing processes by creation of automated standard test scenarios and regression test-sets
Boost time to market – decreases time to market for new services, price plans and functional changes in the Billing System by delivering faster test results
Improves customer satisfaction – Customer’s experience will be enhanced by less amount of faulty charged services
Reduces amount of deficient bills – a higher level of correctness in the customer’s bill will help the customer care by less com- plaints
Consistent test coverage – automation keeps the defined test coverage steady, even if the tests have to be urgently performed
Improves risk assessment – automated tests with a high coverage rate reduce the business risk
Fast analyses – helps to reproduce quickly errors in a life system and supports to determinate the amount of effected customers inside a population. For Roaming department, our TAP extractor provides filters for any possible constellation inside a huge TAP file and gives the possibility to extract only the selected services into a new TAP file for further checks.
Automates the TADIG processes – TADIG tests will become more fast and easy to clarify any suspicious information inside the TAP files with the Clearing House or other provider. It helps to eliminate overhead inside Roaming department.
Fast Amortisation – offering a fair price-value relation, M&I Test Tools will quickly redeem their investment.
FUNCTIONS
All functionalities are managed within 2 separate tools, called Testcreator and Ratescanner, that can be used either as stand alone or in combination depending on the test purpose. This segmentation makes the handling for the tester more simple and efficient, furthermore it gives the possibility to split test responsibilities inside a test group, so that there’s no need for each tester to comprehend both tools.
Testcreator provides three main modules: CDR File Manipulator, Generator and Extractor
Manipulator
Manipulator handles CDR files by using decoding and encoding technologies:
Decoder: opens source (input) files and decodes the file’s for- mat into a structured text. Such function is vital when contents of ASN1-coded formats should be checked. Inside the text view, a tester can perform any change according to the test-case.
Encoder: After manipulation was done, the text file will be encoded to the original format and saved into a destination (output) file folder.
Automatic mode: in addition to the manual changes, the Manipulator gives the possibility of mass changes inside a file for the most common operations: replace time stamps and customer data with predefined parameters (quick select function). With such a method, all input files can be easily adapted to be processed under the condition of a test environment (date, time and customer data). The original input file remains untouched by the manipulation. Using adapted CDR files from live system for test environments allow among others performance tests and fast replication of defects.
Generator
Generator creates CDR files according to predefined test-scenarios. Those test-scenarios are built by input-tables, where all relevant information of customer-, call-, and provider-data are stored.
Such definition can be either done manually, or by existing CDR files from live system. The scenarios used inside existing CDR files can be taken as a template for generating similar files fitting to the condition of testing. Any value inside the new test file can be adapted by a flexible parameter-value table.
After all settings for the requested test files are done, Generator provides 2 different outputs: a CDR file plus a related Generated Source Table (GST) for further testing with the Ratescanner (see chapter Testing Schema).
Extractor
Extractor gives the ability to filter inside CDR files for a combination of parameters. This module helps to analyse the contents of a file quickly. In case there is a problematic service scenario inside the records, the amount of effected customers, charge volume and any other relevant information can be extracted.
Two reports – containing the results of extracted values and statistical information – provide a full information about the results from the used filter criteria.
Additionally the extracted data can be used to create a new file for testing purpose. Extractor enables searching for a specific CDR, decoder transformed into structured text format. Such CDR can be inserted to Generator, variables adapted fur use of any test customer.
Ratescanner contains a Product Catalogue, Rating Engine and Compare features
Database manages all customer data that is relevant for guiding and rating a service – Reference tables, Application tables and Product Catalogue (includes all rating features, price plans, zones, providers)
Loader automates actualisation of customer data for the database, changes in the customer storage can be managed easy and fast by loading them from a table instead of manual updates
Rater loads files from an input folder and provides a selection for required market and provider after all selections are done, files will be analyzed, rated and finally, results are written into the output folder.
Several options allow defining a range of tolerance for the results, a SQL query collection for manual selects and some other parameters for the rating scheme.
After Rater has finished the processing, it delivers two log files:
Detailed Log File – gives information about every rating step that has been performed for each service that was used in the CDR file and shows the result. Such log files get very huge when big CDR files are processed. They are necessary to investigate mismatches between the expected and given result. A source of mismatches can be either a wrong entry inside the customer database of the tool, an error in the input file or simply a negative test result for the performed test case.
Summary Log File – gives an structured overview for all processed CDRs to check how many results are matching with the expectation and how many differences appeared.
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