Mu Dynamics (News - Alert), a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, today unveiled new testing capabilities for its Test Suite Solution to help customers meet key requirements of IP service testing regardless of their specific customer ecosystem – telecom, smart grid, mobile operator or even cloud computing.

 

With these new and expanded capabilities, Mu aims to sell what Adam Stein (News - Alert), Mu’s vice president of marketing, called “the industry’s only integrated solution to quickly and cost effectively address the key requirements of IP service testing regardless of the specific customer ecosystem.”

 

The refined testing methods are designed to test more accurately the actual services that need testing. The spruced-up Suite obtains a better sampling of IP service traffic – or test cases built from vendors and operators IP service traffic – which expedites both the testing time and the respective products’ time to market at a higher level of quality and lower total expense.

 

“Mu’s key breakthrough around testing IP services is in effectively addressing the challenge of the unique and rapidly changing nature of IP services,” Stein said. “The only way to do this is to use actual customer service traffic as a basis for testing, and that is exactly what the new Mu solution enables.”

 

The upgraded Test Suite enables two critical capabilities. Most importantly, it gives users the ability to model the logic of an IP service for the purposes of testing.

 

As every IP service is a complex set of interactions across components within an infrastructure, the traditional approach of testing individual components of a service and declaring it good is on the way out, Stein said.

 

“Testing is no longer about bit blasting packets or canned protocol test cases against a single piece of infrastructure,” Stein said. “The paradigm for testing IP services needs to evolve so the service flows themselves are being tested, not each underlying component. The Mu solution allows our customer to use their own service traffic to model the actual service for the purpose of testing. We then allow customers to test service flows, not just individual underlying components. This paradigm is well understood in the business application testing space with companies like HP. Now that infrastructures are effectively applications, that same testing paradigm is required for testing IP services.

The Suite’s second critical capability is to use actual service traffic as the basis for rapid and automated test case creation that can leveraged across multiple aspects of testing – functional, interoperability, resilience and security.

 

All tests automatically generated are designed to test to the user’s service, not some generic “standard,” Stein said.

 

“Test vendors will never keep up with the pace of innovation,” Stein said. “The paradigm has to change. The Mu solution allows customers to capture and use their own service traffic as the basis for test case creation. That means when customers have to quickly test a brand new service, they don’t need to wait for test vendors to deliver canned test cases to them – instead, they capture their actual IP Service traffic and automatically create tests. This vastly accelerates their time to market.”

 

And according to some industry analysts, the timing couldn’t be better.

 

“A new growth catalyst for testing complex real-time information applications is clearly emerging in many related industries,” said Mike Montecillo, principle analyst of security and risk management for EMA (News - Alert) Associates. “Mu’s approach of sampling a customer’s actual service traffic for test creation rapidly improves IP service product quality, time to market and effectiveness.”