Testerman History and Road as received from Sebastian

[Saravanan Shanmugham]

This is post on behalf of Sebastian the author of Testerman to document the history and some road map ideas.

------------------------------

The history behind Testerman:

It started in 2006 as a side project in a company specialized in VoIP call control server (as you seem to work for Cisco, you may have heard of them: NetCentrex, now part of Comverse).
We were looking for a testing tool able to do more than just test a single type of interface (VoIP, or Web Service, or ...) - we needed something able to provision the SUT through Web Services, place several VoIP calls, check RTP streams, simulate Diameter responses, check log files on multiple servers, call detail report generations, ... and we didn't want to use multiple tools to do this - most commercial tools are limited to a single technical domain, such as web testing, or protocol testing, etc; we need the glue to orchestrate them all.

TTCN-3 systems were versatile enough for the job, but they didn't come with actual Test Adapters that we could use directly. In all cases, we had to develop things, so we started this project.

Two years later, I left Comverse/Netcentrex and reimplemented the tool from scratch as an open-source project, Testerman, with an improved technical architecture and more TTCN-3 compliant features.
Since then, Comverse contributed by giving portions of the initial development so that they could benefit from the future improvements more easily.


The plans:

The hopes for 2010 were: finish the documentation, and start advertising it. Then, we'll see.
Current plans: they are driven by my current employer that is using it increasingly on very different projects, as well as requests from the other users.
They include in the short term:
- "profile" management, i.e a way to run an ATS (script) with different parameters easily. It can already be done, but this is not convenient enough for a daily use.
- a Diameter codec
At mid term:
- better test results management
- script revisions management
- documentation completion
At long term:
- remote PTC executions (currently they are executed in a thread in the Test Executable even if the probes are remote; the idea would be to have them run on remote agents too, thus having a fully scalable distributed test system)

I also have a SIP Virtual Endpoint (a SIP softphone 100% implemented in Testerman, offering a high-level interface so that you have the same level of control as if you were in front of a physical SIP phone) to commit (and document).

Of course, I consider any requests from the users.


Where to discuss about it:

I didn't set up anything for now... no mailing list, no forum, due to its limited spread direct email contacts were sufficient. However, things may change - what would you advice to start ? a mailing list ?


The dev team:

I'm the main committer, however a lot of people tested it, gave valuable feedbacks, and some provided patches I integrated. Contributions (and contributors) are welcome !
---------------

Thx,

Sarvi