Use cases for architectural smoke-tests

I often leverage use-case design and touch-point mapping through the stack to ensure that all of the use-cases can be turned into user-journeys, process journeys and data journeys. This process can pick up the high-level flows, but more importantly, the high-level gaps in your theoretical stack.”

Yesterday’s blog discussed the use of use cases to test a new OSS architecture. TM Forum’s eTOM is the go-to model for process mapping for OSS / BSS. Their process maps define multi-level standards (in terms of granularity of process mapping) to promote a level of process repeatability across the industry. Their clickable model allows you to drill down through the layers of interest to you (note that this is available for members only though).

In terms of quick smoke-testing an OSS stack though, I tend to use a simpler list of use cases for an 80/20 coverage:

  • Service qualification (SQ)
  • Adding new customers
  • New customer orders (order handling)
  • Changes to orders (adds / moves / changes / deletes / suspends / resumes)
  • Logging an incident
  • Running a report
  • Creating a new product (for sale to customers)
  • Tracking network health (which may include tracking of faults, performance, traffic engineering, QoS analysis, etc)
  • Performing network intelligence (viewing inventory, capacity, tracing paths, sites, etc)
  • Performing service intelligence (viewing service health, utilised resources, SLA threshold analysis, etc)
  • Extracting configurations (eg network, device, product, customer or service configs)
  • Tracking customer interactions (and all internal / external events that may impact customer experience such as site visits, bills, etc)
  • Running reports (of all sorts)
  • Data imports
  • Data exports
  • Performing an enquiry (by a customer, for the purpose of sales, service health, parameters, etc)
  • Bill creation

There are many more that may be required depending on what your OSS stack needs to deliver, but hopefully this is a starting point to help your own smoke tests.

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