Design And Implementation Of An Automatic Testing Framework For Parlay X Gateway

Parlay X has proven its indispensable edge in developing next-generation value-added applications and has established itself as the core technology for third-party service interface of the future. There are some products relating to Parlay X in the marketplace. Duo to characteristics of telecommunication products and the lack of mapping protocol for Parlay X 3.0, mass testing efforts for those products have met with lots of problems, including excessive spending, low efficiency, monotonous work and poor adaptability.Based on automatic testing theory and designed to overcome the problems in practice, this paper is focused on the design and implementation of an auto-test framework for Parlay X gateway. A fairly large portion of this paper is devoted to explaining the rationales for the specific design choices for the framework. Developing a Parlay gateway simulator has enabled us to customize and leverage the testing environment at the source code level, to emulate testing scenarios, and therefore to improve test case coverage. In our approach, each test case is written in a single XML script, which, combined with the use of reflection mechanism, gives testers the ability to control Parlay gateway simulator and Web service client without any programmatic work. A template mechanism is employed to reuse XML scripts, more importantly, to ensure test cases' adaptability across different implementations of Parlay X mapping by various vendors. This framework is able to cover most of the test cases and provide fast regression tests for an operator-grade Parlay X gateway. Moreover, the design of this framework may serve as future reference for the testing of other telecommunication products. Drawing on the extension capabilities of its own, this framework can be applied to automatic testing for products such as SIP application servers.