by TIP News
In early Q2 2022, engineers from Meta, Keysight, Dell, Anritsu and EANTC voluntarily came together under the Test & Integration Project Group to create a focus group intent on creating a first-of-its-kind Open Test Automation Use Case document.
Throughout 2022, the focus group diligently built this Use Case from the ground up. Now in 2023, the work has been
published to the public, and is garnering interest from industry partners about potential implementation.
To-date, test automation efforts in the industry have been conducted in isolation, classifiable in two aspects:
1. Dependency, and hard-coding to local environments (lab IPs, services), and
2. Custom tooling/frameworks and processes typically treated as intellectual properties.This approach leads to duplication in efforts, blocking the ability for developers and testers to share, collaborate, and reuse existing efforts (tests, scripts, frameworks) across lab and corporations.
The Use Case document promotes a shared, common approach towards test processes, framework selection, and best practices. While it continues to respect intellectual properties (such as the actual test steps, result indices), it promotes for such to be conducted over shared, common and familiar infrastructure that enables knowledge sharing and test reusability. Thus, the Use Case document sets out to facilitate the exchange of test automation artifacts/scripts across different labs while ensuring compatibility with different E2E test automation platforms and measurement equipment. The Use Case document also seeks to ensure that different test automation platforms provide consistent and shareable test results.
The Use Case specifically focuses on crafting an architecture for O-RU test automation:
While version 1.0 of this Use Case does not focus on the implementation of the platform, there’s hope that future collaborations on version 2.0 will put this plan into action as a proof-of-concept.
Top 3 key messages
- In 2022, volunteers from Meta, Keysight, Dell, Anritsu and EANTC came together under the Test & Integration Project Group to create an Open Test Automation Use Case document from the ground up.
- With an RU focus, the Use Case document set out to facilitate the exchange of test automation artifacts/scripts across different labs while ensuring compatibility with different E2E test automation platforms and measurement equipment.
- Lastly, the Use Case document seeks to ensure that different test automation platforms provide consistent and shareable test results.
Click here to view the OA Use Case Document.