Cedar Point Communications Drives New Levels of Productivity with FanfareSVT™

Company

Cedar Point Communcations Cedar Point Communications — the leader in integrated packet-based voice switching technologies for cable .industry operators offering true broadband services, including data, voice, and video.

Business challenge

Cedar Point Communications required a test automation solution that would allow them to increase test coverage, boost productivity at the individual tester level without requiring programming expertise, and work seamlessly with its existing automation infrastructure.

Solution

Cedar Point Communications implemented FanfareSVT test automation software to complement existing technologies and test processes, simplify and accelerate automated testing, and increase productivity gains throughout the entire system verification engineering organization.

Business results

Reduced the overall time required to set up and execute tests
Gained greater test coverage by automating manual, repetitive, time-consuming tasks
Empowered individual testers, even non-programmers, to contribute towards automation
Increased productivity levels by focusing on core competencies

Cedar Point Communications develops packet-based voice switching technologies designed specifically for the cable industry. The company's product, SAFARI C3™ Multimedia Switching System, is the industry's first telephony solution to support voice-over-IP (VoIP) and legacy circuit switched traffic within one integrated media switching infrastructure. With SAFARI C3, cable operators in the U.S. and abroad, including Comcast, Insight Communications, Charter Communications, and many others, can now deliver true broadband services — voice, video, and data — to their subscribers. Because Cedar Point uses a single-solution approach that fits easily within existing cable networks, it accelerates the deployment of new services with simple integration and reduced ongoing operations costs.

Assessing test automation, seeking productivity gains

Given the fast pace of the industry and its customers' demands, Cedar Point Communications must keep pace with the sharp competitive pressures in the telephony marketplace. Before a new release is rolled out to customers, the company's system verification engineers must validate its functionality.

"(Fanfare) empowers individual testers to automate while they develop tests instead of building tests manually and then trying to automate them later." - Chris Saturley, Director of System Verification Engineering

In order to meet the timely and sizeable demands of its testing efforts, Cedar Point's system verification engineering organization began laying the groundwork for a test automation strategy. "It is critical that we meet the needs of our customers in a timely manner," said Chris Saturley, director of system verification engineering at Cedar Point. "Automation is critical to our success and something we've been investing in for the past couple of years with an internal automation team. As part of our testing strategy, we've built out a test harness and put an overall regression infrastructure in place."

While developing its testing strategy, Cedar Point determined that an automation infrastructure was not the only answer. It was also critical to boost productivity at the individual tester level in order to increase test coverage. As Saturley explained, "People often view automation as whether they can run the entire test automatically. But they should also consider the benefit of being able to automate time-intensive tasks for every tester. When these activities take days to accomplish, you only test at the beginning of the release cycle and again later on. But if you can automate these repetitive activities, then you can run those tests more frequently and gain additional test coverage."

To accomplish that goal, Cedar Point selected FanfareSVT test automation software to complement existing technologies and test processes, simplify and accelerate automated testing, and increase productivity gains throughout the entire system verification engineering organization.

FanfareSVT gets thumbs-up approval from senior testers

Before purchasing FanfareSVT, it was essential for Saturley to involve his senior testers in the evaluation process. "I wanted feedback from my most senior guys who would really tell me how flexible Fanfare was and if it could really work for us," said Saturley. "I asked about third-party box interaction, how hard it was to learn the constructs, how flexible the language was, could it be multi-threaded, etc. After they started playing with it, they told me 'I can do this, and I can do that.' It was very evolutionary." In addition, Saturley verified that Fanfare could integrate with the automated infrastructure that was currently under development. This future, yet critical, requirement provided Cedar Point with the flexibility to run FanfareSVT from their existing infrastructure and scale to future configurations.

Based on the feedback from his testers, Saturley also made the decision to invest in FanfareSVT product training even though his team was in the middle of six-week release cycle. "We gave it the time because the feedback from my team was that it would be valuable to us in the long run."

A speedy and successful deployment became reality thanks in part to excellent FanfareSVT product training, as well as the company's prompt and responsive support team.

Delivering time savings and increased test coverage

Using Fanfare, the organization can now combine test development, execution, documentation, and automation into a single step. "Fanfare automates the repetitive, time-consuming functions that we perform on a daily basis, such as setting up the testbed or tearing down different protocols. We increase time savings in our testing, but we also gain up to 10 times the test coverage." said Saturley.

According to Jim Gorman, group lead for system verification engineering at Cedar Point, faster equal cost multipath protocol ECMP tests provide one great example of the gains reaped from FanfareSVT. In the past, these tests required a fair amount of time to execute. "Now we don't even think about these tests," said Gorman. "We run them overnight, they take a couple hours to complete, and we get the results in the morning."

Automation made easier

With Fanfare, Cedar Point is extending test automation to its entire system verification engineering team and transforming it from the inside out. "I have testers who are like PhD's, and I want them doing that level of work," said Saturley. FanfareSVT helps make that happen." Gorman agreed, "Fanfare enables us work more efficiently. Now when we encounter issues, rather than trying to recreate it, we can simply send the test case to the developer and say, 'You run it.'"

Saturley expressed that empowering the individual tester to automate just makes good business sense. "The real value we get from Fanfare is that it empowers individual testers to automate while they develop tests instead of building tests manually and then trying to automate them later."