No-Code Test Automation in Telecoms: Breaking Down Testing Silos

Even though digital transformation was already a strategic priority, COVID-19 has amplified its importance and accelerated its adoption. When we look back at the last 10 years, we can see that a lot has happened. Digital native companies were rapidly emerging while the big telecom operators were falling short in their new-era digital efforts.

However, the year 2020 saw the Telecoms industry making big changes in record time for better or worse. Transitioning staff, including call centers, to work remotely; adopting digital channels to increase customer engagement; managing the huge increase in demand for home broadband connection; and accelerating the provision of broadband connectivity. The technologies available to us today have made this shift possible. Nevertheless, this digital transformation has been on the cards for a long time, telcos just forcefully had to adapt to it in a very short span of time, but the aim and the goals still are the same.

Digital transformation aims to improve customer experience by providing a seamless, digital omnichannel experience.

This is achieved by giving the existing siloed, decoupled business system infrastructure a much needed upgrade: a replacement. Automation will make that effort much more manageable and feasible by increasing agility and efficiency.

The way telecom enterprises operate IT is too complex. Their legacy systems don’t offer an innovative and seamless experience for customers. According to a report by TM Forum, ‘inflexible legacy IT technology’ was ranked as the number one barrier to digital transformation.

Telcos’ monolithic core IT systems are a challenge for QA teams. Testers have to anticipate end-user behavior and balance that against requirements for each business domain. This means creating strategies that cover as many product categories as possible under time and budget constraints. In larger organizations, it is common for testing teams to work in different business domains. With laser sharp focus they can spot inconsistencies but are less likely to see issues that arise once a system goes live.

While their business domain may work fine, there is often a lack of clarity over the larger business landscape and the interdependencies of the multiple business units. So while a particular functionality might work fine, there are high chances of it affecting another business domain. This puts a user’s omnichannel experience at risk.

So how can you maintain business continuity while transforming decoupled and siloed customer channels into omnichannel systems? This whitepaper will help telcos identify and tackle these common issues , and proposes a way to unify testing efforts through no-code automation.