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To maintain their competitive edge in 2024 and beyond, telecom companies have to stay ahead of emerging industry technologies. QA serves as a linchpin in this process, helping ensure the smooth implementation of innovations.  

In this article, we’ll take a look at the key telco trends for this year and explore a QA strategy to launch high-quality telco software in an era of unprecedented change. 

Navigating the trends reshaping telecom industry in 2024 

Trend #1. 5G  

Surpassing 1.5 billion connections by the end of 2023, 5G has firmly established itself as the fastest-growing mobile broadband technology of recent years. This statistic underscores the immense potential that 5G holds for transforming connectivity worldwide. By 2030, the GSMA professionals predict that 53% of the population will be using 5G, 35% — 4G, 8% — 3G, and 1% — 2G. 

Telecom trends 2024

Source: The Mobile Economy 2024 

The reach of 5G networks continues to expand across various regions from urban centers to remote rural areas while offering ultra-fast speeds, low latency, and high capacity.  

Moreover, the advent of 5G is driving innovation in various industries. In healthcare, it facilitates real-time remote surgeries and high-definition video consultations between patients and healthcare professionals. In entertainment, 5G delivers immersive virtual experiences that allow users to enjoy multiplayer games with on-the-fly responsiveness and minimal lags.  

As the adoption of 5G-enabled devices and services continues to grow, telecom companies should focus on ensuring seamless network performance, smooth operation of mobile and web applications and computing centers, and strong security to provide customers with the full potential of 5G technology. 

Trend #2. Broadband connectivity  

2024 marks a significant milestone in the expansion of broadband connectivity. Consumers are witnessing a proliferation of options for accessing the high-speed Internet driven by advancements in terrestrial wireline, terrestrial wireless, and satellite technologies.  

Nowadays, Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite Internet are gaining momentum, particularly in remote regions. These technologies help offer viable options to traditional wired broadband services, bridge the digital divide, and extend access to previously inaccessible areas. 

Trend #3. AI-driven solutions  

AI-driven solutions are now becoming increasingly prevalent in the telecommunications industry, enabling operators to: 

  • Optimize network performance. By adjusting routing protocols and network topologies, AI-powered networks can adapt to changing conditions and traffic loads, ensuring consistent user experiences. 
  • Enhance cybersecurity. By analyzing network traffic patterns and identifying suspicious behavior, AI-driven security systems can proactively mitigate cyber attacks, protecting sensitive data and infrastructure from harm. 
  • Deliver personalized services to clients. By leveraging customer data and behavioral insights, AI helps telecom companies tailor service offerings and recommendations to individual preferences, increasing their loyalty and receiving more revenue opportunities. What’s more, with AI seamlessly integrated into chatbots and personalized AI assistance, they can elevate their client support. AI-driven networks enable efficient problem-solving and service sales without human intervention, minimizing operational expenses. 
  • Ensure predictive maintenance. With AI at the core, telcos continuously monitor the state of their equipment, analyzing statuses and identifying anomalies in network performance. By leveraging AI algorithms, they proactively resolve issues before they impact customer experience, reducing downtime and enhancing overall reliability. This data-driven approach allows them to predict potential failures and take proactive measures to address them with the hardware, including cell towers, power lines, and servers in data centers, ensuring seamless operations and uninterrupted service delivery.  

Driving successful adoption of telecom trends with the help of QA  

QA is indispensable to ensure the successful implementation of telecom trends and the reliability of IT products. Let’s explore key testing types, helping deliver high-quality telco software. 

All tests can be devided into two groups: 

  1. Functional and non-functional testing 

Performance testing 

Performance testing holds a pivotal role in guaranteeing the seamless operation of critical systems responsible for delivering telecommunications services. By meticulously subjecting telecom solutions to stress and load tests, companies can ascertain whether they are able to promptly respond to a myriad of subscriber requests. This involves scrutinizing both client- and server-side functionalities, ensuring that vital components, such as billing and CRM systems, efficiently receive and process requests. 

Performance checks help telco operators release highly reliable software while delivering exceptional user experiences and maintaining customer satisfaction. 

Functional testing 

Functional testing ensures that all features of telecom products work as intended. It extends to verifying applications designed for customers, user support systems (chatbots or live chats with operators), back-end software for telecom, data centers, CRMs, ERPs, and additional services (media streaming platforms). 

This involves testing various scenarios, inputs, and outputs to verify the correct behavior of the software. For instance, validating the functionality of invoicing processes. 

As part of functional testing, UAT helps ensure the seamless integration of new systems, modules, or integrated solutions within telecom businesses. While traditionally associated with third-party integrations, UAT testing extends beyond this scope to encompass newly developed systems or modules as well. 

The aim of UAT is to validate business requirements, verify functionalities, and assess user experience across various applications and platforms. For instance, in the integration of self-service portals and mobile apps, UAT testing enables QA teams to simulate real-world usage, such as managing accounts, viewing usage details, and paying bills. Additionally, it allows verifying the usability, performance, and security measures implemented to protect customer data and transactions. 

Security testing 

Security testing is paramount to safeguard sensitive customer data and safeguard against cyber threats, considering the extensive network and cloud infrastructure involved. Telecom companies should be highly vigilant about potential data leakage and breaches, as they handle end-user financial and personal information. Moreover, with numerous entry points into telecom networks, including interconnected software, like CRMs, billing, and operational systems, comprehensive security testing is a must-have. 

By conducting penetration testing, businesses simulate real-world attacks to identify potential weaknesses in telecom systems, such as weak authentication mechanisms or exposed network ports. 

To uncover entry points for cybercriminals and assess the safety posture of telco infrastructure, companies can introduce vulnerability scanning tools, including Acunetix, Burp Suite, and Nessus. 

Test automation 

Telco providers can automate any tests, but it’s more profitable to automate repetitive test scenarios, reducing manual effort and accelerating the QA workflow.  

To enhance testing coverage and efficiency, telecom providers leverage automated regression testing. By automating test processes, companies perform more tests in less time, significantly boosting coverage and accuracy while neutralizing the risk of human errors. These automated scripts can be reused repeatedly, optimizing overall testing efforts and ensuring comprehensive coverage across software updates, patches, and configuration changes. 

  1. Testing based on the product type 

OSS/BSS testing 

As OSS and BSS form the backbone of telecom services, it’s mission-critical to enable their seamless running. OSS/BSS testing encompasses a range of QA activities tailored to validate the functionality, reliability, security, and performance of telco systems, which are responsible for key functions, involving billing, customer management, and network operations. 

With OSS/BSS checks, businesses also verify the accuracy of billing calculations for various service plans and validate the CRM system to make sure that customer information or service requests are accurately captured and processed. 

Migration testing 

It’s imperative to test the data and readiness of the system before moving to new OSS/BSS systems, such as billing or CRM platforms. This process involves migrating and validating large volumes of data to ensure seamless integration and prevent disruptions to routine subscriber activities. Additionally, it’s necessary to address security vulnerabilities and optimize performance to uphold uninterrupted subscriber activities. 

Cloud testing 

Cloud computing plays a pivotal role in modern telecom operations, enabling companies to scale resources up and down, such as networks and servers, as well as storage on-demand. Leveraging cloud infrastructure, telecoms can keep and process vast amounts of user data remotely, ensuring cost efficiency and global reach. 

Therefore, businesses can introduce cloud testing to assess the reliability, scalability, and security of telecom products delivered through cloud infrastructure. 

With cloud tests, operators can also confirm the security posture of cloud-based telecom solutions, including data encryption, access controls, and compliance with industry standards. 

To conclude 

The telecommunications landscape is continuously evolving. 5G, broadband connectivity, and AI-driven solutions are set to redefine this sector in 2024.  

To implement these trends with confidence and assurance, businesses can encompass a comprehensive QA strategy that involves performance, functional, OSS/BSS, migration, UAT, cloud, security, and automated testing. 

Reach out to a1qa’s team to get support in ensuring the high quality of your telecom software. 

How can telecom companies maintain market leadership in 2023? Adopting novel tech trends can be of help but it is a tricky process. So, how can businesses simplify it while achieving the desired outcomes? In the article, find out the 4 emerging telecom trends and 6 testing types that are pivotal to implementing them.

4 telecom trends to adopt in 2023: make your software unrivaled

Let’s see what trends will shape the future of the telecom industry.

Trend #1. No need to wait with 5G and 6G

Mobile ecosystems are constantly evolving, however, in today’s world, companies are in search of methods to make wireless communication even faster with higher capacity and frequency and lower latency. Even though 5G is still trending, many organizations are looking ahead and gradually introducing 6G, providing better throughput, higher data rates and reliability as well as unrivaled immersive experience when it comes to AR/VR.

Consider this: if 5G offered the speed of 1 GB per second (or with peak data rates of 20 GB), 6G will reach one TB, which is 8,000 times faster than 5G.

Source: Statista

Trend #2. Cloud introduction or amplifying the power of your digital ecosystem

Have you noticed the number of apps migrating to the cloud? Of course, business realizes that their target audience wants to access the software from anywhere. So, telecom companies are also looking for the ways to provide more flexible and scalable solutions with high computing power over the cloud. This is because the growth of such devices as IoT, AI, and ML has driven the demand for more powerful computing capabilities. Here, cloud computing assists in improving program resilience and efficiency, accelerating the digitalization processes, and easily transforming all flowing procedures to meet customers’ needs.

Trend #3. Network-as-a-service (NaaS) or having the network infrastructure without building it from scratch

Since building, deploying, and maintaining routers, WAN optimizers, and other network elements is a cumbersome process, organizations rely heavily on NaaS. NaaS removes the need to invest in network hardware and infrastructure, helping businesses avoid budget overruns.

As user traffic often varies and can exceed the expected limit, NaaS ensures that your network runs smoothly even during high loads and prevents system disruptions.

Trend #4. Edge computing or shortened response time

According to Statista, the edge computing market will reach $250.6 billion by 2024. By storing, processing, and analyzing data locally, edge computing provides higher performance, bandwidth optimization, low latency, refined security, and soundness for IoT, AR/VR, industry 4.0, and other devices possessing sensitive controllers.

It will allow cutting down on exploitation expenditure by reducing large volumes of data previously kept on the cloud.

How to take care of software quality when implementing telecom trends?

It’s critical to ensure a high software level. To achieve this, we see companies applying QA aimed at checking various system aspects and eliminating bugs in them.

#1. OSS/BSS testing

Integrating a myriad of devices, like servers, cloud-hosted machines, tablets, phones, etc., and handling large volumes of transactions, OSS/BSS systems should be able to function correctly around the clock. This allows verifying 3 key aspects of OSS/BSS software:

  • Performance. The number of flowing operations and users skyrockets from time to time, so for the software, it’s mission-critical to withstand all kinds of loads: from regular to peak ones.
  • Security. These systems are vulnerable to unauthorized intrusion, which often results in the leakage of clients’ and company’s private data.
  • Functionality. Can subscribers create, modify, and delete accounts? Can they easily perform all necessary actions, such as tracking and paying invoices? Functional verification assists in confirming that the OSS/BSS solutions comply with the stated requirements and simplify user interaction with the system.

#2. Migration testing

Just imagine this: you have a billing solution containing a slight calculation error. Sure, it’ll cause user dissatisfaction and 100, 1,000, or more customer support calls. Migration should be smooth without affecting the routine actions of subscribers.

The transformation of the telecom product, such as receiving new features, always requires the transition of a large amount of data from the source system to the target one. Migration tests help make this process seamless and ensure required data integrity while preventing its losses.

#3. Integration testing

Telecom software products have a complex structure and comprise a multitude of modules. Just look: one IT solution may include billing, customer support, and self-service systems as well as an integration platform.

But how to make sure that all of them seamlessly correlate with each other? Integration testing is of help in such situations that allow timely identify integration discrepancies in the app and ensure the proper functioning of interrelated modules.

Based on the entire system and its individual parts readiness and the desired deadline, companies may employ different integration testing strategies. For example, the big bang one is aimed at the systems in which all components are already interconnected to assess the integrity of the whole product. If the program isn’t entirely ready, it is better to start with low-level blocks by applying the bottom-up approach.

#4. Performance testing

When you need to combine several systems into a single one or the number of subscribers of your telecom software multiplies, putting performance testing at the core of a business strategy is a must-have.

So, what types of checks are helpful?

  • Load testing — to check that the system handles the required load.
  • Stress testing — to exclude program crashes if the number of users expands.
  • Volume testing — to make sure that the increased amount of data stored won’t cause software breakdown.
  • Scalability testing — to analyze how the telecom product responds to changes in architecture, the number of simultaneous subscribers, and generated requests.

#5. Cybersecurity testing

According to Deloitte, in 2020, cybercriminals stole the sensitive data of more than 500,000 people across the globe from video conferencing and sold it on the dark web. Quite an alarming case, agree? The most common attacks in the telecom sector, where 45% of all are cloud-based, include DNS (79% of companies suffered it in 2020), SS7, DDoS, and others, which ultimately lead to downtime, damaged reputation, and high operational expenditure needed to restore the software.

Well, to prevent breaches within telecom systems, companies make use of cybersecurity tests — conduct a vulnerability assessment, static code analysis, penetration testing, social engineering activities, and more — providing a safe experience for subscribers.

#6. Test automation

Testing telecom software may be time-consuming, especially if done manually. Adopting test automation is a logical choice to reduce test cycles, improve test coverage, and decrease QA costs as well as increase ROI from 37% to 50%, as stated in the World Quality Report.

Closing thought

In 2023, telecom companies may rely on 4 topical trends ― 6G, cloud introduction, NaaS, and edge computing ― to continue providing end users with a consummate digital experience.

And to take exceptional care of telecom software quality, organizations just call for QA and verify the following aspects: OSS/BSS, migration, integration, performance, and cybersecurity, as well as introduce test automation to accelerate the testing process.

In case you don’t plan to boost your telecom product quality yourself and need professional QA assistance, reach out to a1qa’s professionals.

In line with digital transformation, the demand for new technologies is growing by leaps and bounds. Businesses are geared towards more independence in the IT sphere, so it’s no longer enough just to support the product – its advancement is a big deal.

One of the ways to suit the requirements of the rapidly evolving market is data migration to the cloud with a secure and well-tuned transfer process at the helm. Otherwise, it can trigger severe repercussions for both production and company.

In this article, we will unveil topical quality issues of data migration and unleash cloud testing potential for business development.

Is it worth starting data migration to the cloud?

Prompt tech market evolution forces businesses to harness new technologies and strengthen their IT apps.

By using cloud computing, organizations not only streamline workflow but also get additional competitive perks. We’ve put together 5 advantages the business can gain in this case.

  1. Round-the-clock access. Now employees are not strictly dependent on the office as cloud storage allows working at any time and any place leveraging 24/7 ecosystem availability.
  2. Total scalability. By choosing cloud, companies can up- or downscale their computing resources thus adjusting the services depending on their needs and objectives.
  3. High data security. Concomitant process security is noteworthy as information can be restored easily due to data backup.
  4. Accelerated adoption. Software and hardware resources can be reconfigured into new information systems and business services in less than no time.
  5. Cost-effectiveness. Companies pay only for the services and capacity they use. There is no longer a need to purchase special equipment and applications for the maintenance of a data center.

Since you have dealt with a cloud provider, you don’t need to hire technical support specialists providing reasonable budget allocation.

Remember it’s not a walk in the park

Despite all that said, data migration can be risky and stressful.

A solid and comprehensive strategy should be built in advance. All points are to be covered, starting from choosing a cloud provider and ending with data transferring. Profound knowledge of all migration steps can help IT managers eliminate business risks and losses.

Another silver bullet is data integrity. A comprehensive supervising of data transfer ensures its accuracy and consistency to avoid possible future misunderstandings.

The biggest issue in moving data to the cloud is the security of the transfer process. The threat of losing access to information and data breach owing to high susceptibility to various attacks may emerge.

Long transmission time is another challenge. It is not easy to predict how much time data migration can take. The connection speed may slow down due to network problems and hardware limitations.

Because of improper planning, many organizations’ budgets suffer from unanticipated costs. According to the Flexera report, respondents estimated expenditures at 27%, while experts suggested – 35%. Data should be divided into parts and migrate gradually, so you need to consider that beforehand where the data will go, to what extent, and in what order.

Data migration challenges

Salvage transition with cloud testing

Companies gather information for decades, and when the data migration time comes, its volume may be unprecedented. Thorough testing can ascertain the quality of the delivered product and ensure that sensitive information won’t leak.

Business needs and project peculiarities determine the choice of a particular testing service.

Functional testing

The engineers review feature by feature and verify whether it complies with the set requirements, integrates seamlessly with the corporate environment, and meets users’ expectations. Also, they check the correct operation of API, data connections, and all information in new storage for compliance with a previous one.

Test automation

By leveraging its best practices, QA specialists scan internal and external vulnerabilities and evaluate compliance with set standards optimizing resources, easing the workload, and eliminating the human factor.

Security testing

IDC’s survey showcases nearly two-thirds of organizations see security as the biggest challenge for cloud adoption with prevailing hacker attacks.

Solid data protection may be enabled by harnessing more powerful software. However, occasionally users uncover their credentials by accident so that the responsibility falls on the company. Two-factor authentication assuming several steps of login can help avoid such cases. For instance, firstly utilize username and password, secondly — a special code sent over SMS.

Security during data transmission is one more layer of cloud protection. Reliable providers should use traffic encryption with HTTPS protocol and SSL certificate to prevent data interception.

Performance testing

The team examines the virtual environment for its resilience to stress and load, endurance, and network latency to detect weak points in its capacity and scalability.

Denial-of-Service attacks (DoS) are common among malicious users. Multiple simultaneous requests to the computer system force it to use a huge amount of resources that eventually cause server overload. Thus, customers are cut out of using the cloud service. Distributed or DDoS attacks are more frequent and are executed from multiple points. Organizations rarely can withstand them.

Only a cloud vendor can assist in setting necessary protection tools and services. Having numerous data channels with a high bandwidth that are geographically dispersed, the cloud provider counteracts to malicious activities. The company filters the traffic using special analyzers and then delivers legitimate traffic to the client’s service.

Bottom line

A shift to data storage in the cloud became an across-the-board need within the advent of the informational age. It brings a range of benefits, including access from any location, cost-effectiveness, and scalability. On the contrary, its implementation is rather challenging and requires investments, including time and money.

A solid transfer plan, comprehensive cloud testing, and providing a high level of security can allow you to be confident in new storage format and information privacy.

Need consultation on data migration? Feel free to contact our experts.

Transformation of the billing solution

The billing system is a vital element in any telecom network. High-quality billing solutions predetermine great customer service and operator’s stellar reputation in the market.

A traditional billing system is network-derived and serves as a tool to calculate fees for services usage (mainly voice and SMS). However, the customers’ needs change and the reality of digital economy press telecom operators to transform their business models and billing solutions.

A redesigned billing solution should have all the features to generate complex offerings and value-added services, operate in real time (as no user wants to exceed their data cap while watching a video), should be agile in terms of services and products.

The transformation process is a long way in terms of development and quality assurance works that should go unnoticed to the customers. To this end, the fees and terms of service provisioning should stay the same as even a slight increase in fees or a calculation mistake will deteriorate customer experience and increase the claims.

Telecom data migration testing

Ensuring high quality of telco software is the key area of the a1qa expertise.

When testing data migration to the new solution, our company applies a combination of testing types. Yet, the final one is Parallel Testing (also called Back-to-back Testing).

The following article provides insights into what we believe needs to be considered and actioned as part of the planning and execution of a successful Parallel Testing for the Telecom industry.

What is Parallel Testing?

From the view of Telecom industry, Parallel Testing is a strategy to verify the quality of data migration from the existing system to the target one. Testing is performed on the same data with both systems running side by side. The results are compared and any mismatches are analyzed.

It is expected, that in the end, any transaction on the migrated clients will have the same effect when performed in the legacy (old) system and a target (new) one.

In our context, the effect is the same fees charged for the usage of the same services, equal calculation and payments reflection on the customer’s balance sheet.

Any discovered discrepancy is a potential defect in software configuration, migration process, or functionality.

What business processes are tested?

Parallel Testing verifies that the following critical business systems processing large scope of the migrated data work as expected:

  • Cash payments processing
  • Online and offline calls processing
  • Balance forwarding, payments, and fee adjustments processing
  • Fee calculation
  • One-time charges calculation
  • Change of the data plan
  • Service enabling/disabling
  • Data packets activating/deactivating
  • SIM card replacement
  • Billing
  • Remuneration calculation

Setting up environment for Parallel Testing

Setting up a right test environment will ensure testing success. The following components are required for Parallel Testing:

  • A testbed with a target system
  • An environment for data comparison and analysis

The data for the legacy system are collected from the production environment.

Before testing starts, at least one billing plan with all its products should be located on the testbed. Mapping tables with all products, customers’ attributes should be developed.

On the testbed of the target system, there should be a stable version of the latest release that has passed system and acceptance testing.

Additional test environment will help to accomplish the following tasks:

  • Copy operating results of the business processes under test (fees, payments, bonuses, accounts, post-migration data records, etc.)
  • Launch scripts for comparison and save results
  • Analyze discrepancies with the help of the supporting subject tables

Two phases of Parallel Testing

Parallel Testing is performed in two phases:

  • Preliminary phase
  • Regular phase

In the preliminary phase, various kinds of defects are detected and eliminated: poor product mapping, incomplete clients’ attributes transfer, poor synchronization of data between billing subsystems, functionality flaws.

Scripts for results comparison and data analysis will also be debugged in this stage.

Finally, the testing team should get ready for discrepancies analysis before launching regular tests.

Once the preliminary round of testing is over, the regular phase begins.

The main goal of the regular testing round is to detect and eliminate the defects mentioned above.

The difference between the two rounds lies with the amount of clients’ data under test. In the preliminary round, engineers will take only a small portion of the clients that are to be migrated. In the regular phase, all clients should be taken.

By the way, in some cases, it’s possible to omit the preliminary phase.

Dry run testing phase

In any of the phases (preliminary and regular), Parallel Testing is performed immediately after the iteration of Dry Run.

Dry Run shall provide the scope of clients that can migrate to a new system.

For example, the project requirements may define that the clients with a debt in the balance sheet can’t migrate until the debt is paid off.

So in fact, Dry Run is the preparation of data for Parallel Testing.

Once the testing is over, all discrepancies are analyzed and the reasons for them are examined. If necessary, defects are reported to the bug tracking system.

After that, the discrepancy statistics correlated to business processes in collected. The discrepancies impact on the overall workflow is estimated and described.

All the results are presented in the final report.

All the defects that have been detected in the previous stages of Parallel Testing are validated while executing system test cases. However, their elimination should be confirmed in the next stage of Parallel Testing for the same scope of data and products.

Summing up

Parallel Testing is an extra type of data migration testing. Due to the relatively high cost, we recommend launching parallel tests once the system testing that will detect the majority of defects is over.

The advantage of Parallel Testing is that this type of testing provides a wide coverage of both the subscriber base and the configuration of the company’s products due to the fact that real data are taken from the production environment and processed in mass.

In addition, Parallel Testing detects defects that were overseen during system testing and brings down financial and reputational risks of data migration to a minimum.

Finally, we’d like to note down that this type of testing can be useful not only for telecom solutions but also for testing migration of large scope of data of any type.

Contact us to get more information on how our services can help your software deliver the expected value to your business.

White box testing is the approach based upon logical check of the migration script. With the knowledge about the database source and receiver structure the team of QA engineers test completeness and correctness of the script. Still, to start white box migration testing the database should comply with the certain preconditions.

  1. Detailed script description (it should prevent the issues of incorrect data migration or the incompleteness)
  2. Structure of the source and the receiver
  3. Data Migration Mapping (set of migration rules written in any suitable format)

When the testers finally jump start the testing process, they get through the standard points:

  • Check of the number of migrated registries
  • The data are migrated to the appropriate place
  • The data fullness
  • Filling of the obligatory fields
  • The proper source and receiver fields processing
  • Accounting business logic changes

Along with these points of migration script check, testers apply the analysis of the SQL code. The approach covers in details the database structure, used data storage formats, migration requirements, analysis of substances, difference among them and their correct processing. The formats of fields and the migration script transformations are also of great importance.

The white box testing approach requires specified knowledge from a tester, unlike the black box approach.

Still, you rarely meet the applying purely the black box or the white box approach, often the complex approach is used. In the complex approach the QA engineers first check the logic of the migration script (white box approach), then they run functional tests (black box approach) on the application to check the migrated data.

The process of migration testing starts with the analysis of migration requirements, afterwards the approach is defined. The analysis bases upon such points as:

  • Type of data to be migrated
  • Data sources
  • Documentation analysis, describing the migration process
  • Database alterations analysis
  • Database structure and type
  • Data storage format
  • Analysis of migration method
  • Migration approach method

As long as the tester is ready with the analysis, it is time to choose between the types of migration approach. There are three of them:

  1. Black box testing
  2. White box testing
  3. Complex approach

The analysis results are not the only parameters for choosing the approach. You are to pay the attention to the task complexity, client and project manager preferences, employee awareness of database management system specifics and some others. Besides, the more difference between the database source, receiver and data storage formats, the more complex the task is.

Black box testing is the most frequently applied approach. The approach includes running functional tests of the migrated data. The tester validates the way the system processes data: data overview, alteration, search, report creation and some other business operations. The approach, in fact, doesn`t require additional knowledge from a tester.

The execution of functional tests in the back box testing approach allows defining the non-compliance with the system performance requirements before the complex process of load testing. It detects the errors of database simultaneous usage by several users and challenges in request processing.

Still functional tests are not the leading preference in data migration testing. Performance and load tests are of great importance also. High operations processing, defines the new database efficiency and accuracy.
In our next post we`ll make the white box testing overview.

Database is an amount of data composed according to certain rules. It is necessary for long-term storage and multiple usages. Moreover, it is one of the most important structural components of information systems. For providing high-quality data storage and quick information processing database should meet several requirements. Among those are:

  • Authenticity;
  • Integrity;
  • Reliability;
  • Security;
  • Flexibility;
  • High response time.

The named points are considered as the set of non-functional requirements or also quality attributes. They checked according to certain scripts and rated with the marks. As an example of one of those non-functional requirements to the information, the system is search of certain data type in 5 seconds, if the process goes longer the base is low rated.

Though, the quality attributes are not the only testing parameters for verifying the base quality. Apart from that, the system should be compliant with the standard functional requirements.

The compliance is checked with several testing types like performance testing, migration testing, and some others. The aim of all the held tests is to ensure the base quality, request processing, and correct processing of migrated data. As long as the aim is achieved the system is regarded as high-quality one or needing improvement.

Data migration is a complex and important procedure made within the database system, which makes migration testing a basic part of all tests held while database verification. The data migration is held in case of

  1. System alterations;
  2. New system development for replacement of the current one;
  3. New system development to migrate the data from the exterior base.

This testing type checks, if the data leakage or damage happened under the migration process. In addition to that, it verifies the data integrity and completeness, so that the system could be efficiently used for business processes. In the next blog post, we`ll get through the approaches applied in database migration testing.

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