Technical Contracts Assurance

In Panlab two major factors can be identified that may cause interferences and thus do harm to the repeatability of testing sessions. Testing conditions are driven a) by the static setup of the testing environment including selection of devices and topology and b) the dynamic environmental conditions occurring during test execution:

1. While full control of the static setup of devices and topology is available in PII, the exact environmental conditions cannot be accurately anticipated. Traffic either induced by other testing sessions or variances in traffic conditions on inter-test site connections may distort the final testing results. Where exclusive access to the underlying shared transport substrates is not feasible, a Contract Enforcement must be developed providing functionality to enforce and stabilize testing conditions as negotiated with the customer. Functionality for monitoring such dynamic traffic conditions is defined by PII’s quality framework.
2. PII offers access to valuable and rare resources to a wide community of developers and system designers. An efficient use of such resources is desirable and in order to increase utilization of resources, PII supports the parallel execution of testing sessions either within the same testing site or even within the same component where feasible. However, all customers must be affirmed that tests executed in parallel do not affect each other mutually and that any test distortion is averted effectively.
3. PII differentiates two mutually complementing types of testbed descriptions: User define the crucial properties of a testing environment by creating virtual testing environment descriptions independent of available testing resources. During a mapping process PII may create where feasible different physical instantiations of the same testing description in parallel. This allows the parallel execution of testing sessions on different hardware devices. Naturally, the selection of a different physical instantiation must not affect the final testing results. Virtual testing sessions conducted on different physical mappings should yield identical results.