The telecom sector has remained a rapidly growing industry for the past decade. It is also a field that has witnessed countless transformations across the globe. As technology evolves, there are significant shifts in how the telecom industry operates along with its service delivery model to customers. Mobile subscribers have been increasing, leading to a rising requirement for telco testing solutions.
That has been a further increase in the demand for various telecom services when we were in lockdown during the pandemic. The entire world almost got dependent on telecom services, whether online education, work-from-home, entertainment, etc. We are indebted to the telecom industry for facilitating communication even in entire situations.
While telco has handled the increased load and data traffic spike like a pro, it doesn't diminish the challenges the entire industry faced as the world embraced its new normal. Intensified and scattered data density increased the need for testing user experience.
This post will look at the top common telecom industry challenges and how QA helps overcome them. Let's dive right in.
Quality Threats
Almost every software is under some kind of quality threat. The entire industry has a high bar to meet ever-growing customer demands. A quality product has four main pillars – interior design, high security, optimal performance, and seamless functional operation. But security breaches, outages, and other technical issues can be detrimental to revenue and customer trust. The telecom sector faces plenty of performance issues, a lack of reliability in platforms, big data management, and storage challenges, and integration hurdles with desktop and mobile devices.Not to mention, minor errors and app crashes can make or break your business. There are plenty of communication privacy problems and system security issues the telecom industry has to deal with. Most of the time, the highest risk is a breach or fraud due to compromised data encryption and intrusion detection.
Slow Delivery
The telecom industry must keep coming up with brand-new functionalities to meet customer demands. This requirement makes it essential to test the quality of both existing and new features. There was a time when manual regression testing was the mainstream which slowed down the speed of delivering the outcome. As a result, the industry sometimes fails to keep up with the current technological scenario.Cyber Crime Threat
Telecommunication companies store a large amount of sensitive information in the form of both corporate and personal data. To make matters more complicated, this data undergoes continuous transmission through phone calls, messages, online transactions, and emails. These processes make the telecom industry vulnerable to cyber threats such as DNS attacks, DDoS strikes, and SIP attacks.
Some other pain points of telecom services include:Higher network load due to the pandemic has increased the frequency of network failures, server outages, etc., which irritates users.
Compromised third-party integration, such as a lack of coordination with payment gateways, cause transactional problems.
Big data management and storage challenges
Sudden errors and application crash on mobile devices.
Read: Implementing App Security – Here’s How To Do It
How QA Helps In Overcoming Telecom Industry Challenges
It is high time telecom companies started leveraging software testing as a mainstream process. It's the need of the hour to incorporate changing customer requirements to facilitate a great CX. For instance, conformance testing determines the compatibility of the electrical interface, protocol conformance, and transport layer conformance. IVR testing helps check customer call functionality, whereas integration testing determines the connectivity of different software modules in mobile applications.
Protocol testing ensures the proper functioning of transmission control protocol, simple mail transfer protocol, file transfer protocol, hypertext transfer protocol, and more. On the other hand, end-to-end testing covers performance, accessibility, and usability testing that contributes to an excellent customer experience.
Most importantly, QA teams help handle the telco structure's complexity and implement automation testing at the core of an organization's testing strategy. As a result, it leads to reduced test cycles, better test coverage, and higher efficiency. It contributes to the faster launch of high-quality, updated software.
Leveraging QA Services To Guarantee Utmost Quality
A good QA team offers a broad array of testing devices and scenarios, flexible collaboration and cooperation, management effort, cost-cutting solutions, reduced time-to-market, and faster turnaround. The best thing about having a reputed testing team is that you can entrust them with security and the market success of the software products in consideration.
Plenty of businesses have already boosted their brand loyalty with software testing. A reliable QA team quickly and efficiently deals with functionality, performance, usability, system security, load resistance, device compatibility, and localization. It also facilitates system readiness, performs security assessments, detects vulnerabilities, prevents fragmentation problems, and safeguards customer data. Moreover, proper implementation of test automation by QA teams leads to completing more tests without wasting time. Isn't that what the agile framework is all about?
Conclusion
It's highly commendable how the telecom industry has been keeping on par with rapid evolution. Customer expectations are skyrocketing as telecom solutions such as cloud computing, 5G network, and the Internet of Things prepare to become mainstream in the near future.
Telecommunication software has a complex nature due to which developers have to handle a lot of processes such as integrating multiple applications, consolidating management, enforcing modern solutions on products, and so on. Since telecom software also needs extensive automation devices and comprehensive functionality assessment, it's hard to disregard the importance of QA.
As long as you rely on a trusted and credible mobile app testing provider, there is nothing to worry about. Telecommunication companies already have a lot on their plate. They have to worry about infrastructure complexity, storage of private data, and increasing product load in mind.
A competent QA team can help telecom organizations achieve an improved customer experience, reap high retention rates and customer loyalty, enhance their internal processes and initiate consistent innovation throughout.