Demonstration of an Automated Integrated Testing Environment for CTI Systems

We demonstrate the Integrated Testing Environment, ITE, an environment for automated and integrated testing at system level. A companion paper [4] describes the problem of systems integrated testing in its conceptual application modelling focus. Here and in [5], the concept’s implementation is exemplified in case of automated integrated testing of a Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) system. The CTI system consists of a switch, an automatic call distributor, and a suite of applications forming a call center and supporting the tasks of a center’s human agent, e.g., applications that enable an agent to log-on/log-off at the call distributor, or to initiate conference calls with other agents. In the ITE, each hardware and software component of the CTI system is controlled by its own test tool, e.g., a proprietary hardware tracer for the switch or a GUI test tool such as Rational SQA Robot [6] for the applications. Coordinating which action has to be performed by which test tool is under responsibility of the Test Coordinator, a tool built on top of METAFrame Technologies’ Agent Building Center (ABC) [2], a general-purpose environment for specification and verification of complex workflows. As outlined in the following sections, the ITE supports the design of test cases including the verification of their consistency, the interactive combination of test cases resulting in test scenarios, and the execution of test cases and test scenarios in the heterogenous processing environment of CTI systems.