CCI contributed immensely to the success of a Wifi services provider in the following major areas of their engineering group: OSS - Operations Systems Services NSS - Network Systems Services QA - Quality Assurance
- Dashboard to Monitor and operate WiFi edge devices (OSS)
- WiFi network elements (NSS)
- Quality Assurance
Dashboard to Monitor and operate WiFi edge devices (OSS)
CCI developed the enterprise Central Command Dashboard using the latest Web 2.0 technology stack to manage and operate 1000s of network edge devices deployed throughout the US. Some additional capabilities CCI delivered included integration frameworks for Business Objects, integration with the NMD (network management device), and integration with the corporate Federated Security model. CCI used agile processes to ensure rapid and predictable value delivery.
WiFi network elements (NSS)
CCI delivered WAN Aggregation solution and MAC based CALEA feature for law enforcement on a WiFi edge device. With predictability and time to market being the two greatest challenges facing the WiFi provider, CCI turned to building solutions that would help improve quality releases and bring them to market quicker. It helped reduce the time to market from an average of 10 weeks to 1 week. CCI delivered the ability to perform automated nightly builds, and delivered a continuous build pipeline capable of build, provision and test (sanity and smoke) in a physical and virtual environment.
To help prevent a growing number of performance related failures in production, CCI delivered an advance performance testing platform (Broozer) capable of certifying hardware, certifying software releases, detecting potential issues and testing advanced deployment platforms like ReadyZone and High Availability. This capability delivered measurable benefits by discovering potential performance defects and allowing experimental code to be examined under load and stress prior to code being checked into the release code line. In addition to simple load, the system simulated APs and other devices/systems to create simulated test boundaries that would not be possible in any other way than deploying to the field and simulating a potential high risk condition. This additional effort helped to ensure airports, hotels, and large Hospitality venues’ WiFi service would perform well under load without production outages.
Quality Assurance
CCI delivered a comprehensive suite of automation for the WAN Aggregation project that became the foundation of a WiFi’s modern automated testing capability. The automated testing platform, built on Robot testing framework and utilizing Behavior Driven Development (BDD) tests, reduced the 50+ man-week effort to just 10 weeks. The comprehensive test coverage afforded by the automated testing resulted in consistent and smooth deliveries of new feature releases for the WiFi NMD.
The Wifi central command dashboard QA was also automated using a Selenium/Webdriver based testing framework, that resulted in robust, predictable, and timely releases.