Network engineering
Testing
Ensuring network solution performance and reliability
Ensuring network solution performance and reliability
Deploying a product is a cinch, right? Giving it the quality and reliability it needs to work according to its specification is quite another story. Testing is what makes the difference. Every stage of the product life cycle, from design through deployment to maintenance, should be covered by specific types of testing.
There are many different types of tests. From simple acceptance tests for checking a single feature of a product, to a stress-test campaign where things are far more complicated. Choosing the test type you need is only the beginning, however. Creating and running the entire test campaign with product-specific test scenarios is much more complex and requires in-depth analysis of the product, its functionalities, weak points and how they were implemented.
Simple testing is certain to help you deliver a better product. But only a carefully designed and executed test will allow you to bring the quality of your product to another level.
The main goal of Proof of Concept is to ensure all functionalities work as expected. A PoC lab should closely resemble the production environment where a given solution will be deployed. This enables you to test the product thoroughly and provide reliable metrics on what should be expected when you take your production environment live.
Building a PoC can help you analyze a solution’s behavior in abnormal conditions, such as very high traffic throughput or loss of connectivity. You will also be able to check how newly added features impact performance. This will allow you to check scalability, redundancy and the self-healing capability of the System Under Test (SUT).
A PoC building phase should precede the integration of a new networking solution with your network.
Before any solution is set for production deployment, it has to undergo a series of tests. For example, before you can deploy a firewall or realize a client's CPE as cloud vCPE, you need to run functional, performance, scalability, and resilience testing, to name just a few.
Automation in such tests speed up the entire testing process while repeatable testing setups will help you avoid human error. Test automation can include building a testing environment, SUT deployment and configuration, running the tests and gathering the results.