A unified hardware/software fault detection experiment in a 5ESS system

A new approach to customer-oriented end-to-end testing is proposed as an integral part of the architecture for enhancing the reliability of AT&T Bell Labs' products and the quality of their ISDN services. The basic idea is to create virtual customers who are constantly using the system as real customers, thereby continually exercising and monitoring the system's operations in a real working environment. Any potential system problem will thus be detected first by the virtual customers. Therefore, problems are expected to be corrected before any reaction from the paying customers. Such a proposal appears to be relatively simple. The important question concerns whether one can emulate the customers who can effectively set up end-to-end dialogs as done by real customers. The objective of this experiment on the 5ESS (electronic switching system) is to apply this technique to implement virtual customers as a means of on-line, real-time testing of the system's capability in providing high quality customers services. Although a very limited data collection has been taken, the on-line customer-service-oriented testing approach has been demonstrated to be an effective means of uncovering difficult problems in a real system environment.<>