Input requirements needed to produce an operational profile for a new telecommunications system

Summary form only given, as follows. The paper describes our practical experiences in developing an operational profile for a telecommunications system given little existing knowledge about the maintenance/provisioning process and the system's environment. The specific system under test is a high availability, real time system used to provision, maintain, and forecast network hardware for AT&T's emerging technologies. The system requirements needed to derive the various system operating modes, together with the modes' operational profiles are discussed. We also demonstrate how reliability objectives and failure intensity objectives can be defined and subsequently tested under different automated test scenarios for these different system modes.