System testing evaluates the behavior of your product or products in real-world scenarios. System characteristics such as reliability, serviceability, availability, etc are evaluated using methods that emulate the loads, service mixes, and fault scenarios that occur on real networks in the test lab.

System testing can be your best tool or a time and money sink depending on your approach. At Sigma-RT, we've run large and small system test groups and know how to bring the real world to the lab.

System Test Types

Reliability: The reliability of your product is often expressed in terms of MTBF or MTTF. Modeling customer "use cases", configurations, and load scenarios gives you a sense of what your product faces in production. Being able to reasonably replicate a complex production environment in a test lab setting takes a combinations of tools and test techniques. Knowing your product is ready to launch, being able to quantify your MTTF before product release gives you confidence.

Performance and Scale : Networks and communication device architectures are like highways that move data. Performance testing can tell you how much traffic you can handle and ensures what you built is what you expected from the requirements document. Making sure your products can scale to support the kinds of loads imposed by large enterprise networks is essential to a smooth product launch, and BETA.

Stress: The purpose of stress testing is to push your product past it's limits in an effort to cause it to fail. Highly robust products "fail gracefully". That is, they don't crash! Know your limits.

Interoperability: Conformance to standards tests do not ensure interoperability. Standards may be imprecise, be interpreted different ways, or be interpreted incorrectly. Only by actually causing devices supporting a common standard to exercise that standard under rigorous test conditions can you unequivocally state "our product is proven to work" with another.

The above represents a subset of the types of system behaviors that can be evaluated in a system test lab (others include startup/shutdown, system configuration, availability, serviceability, etc). Sigma-RT knows how to approach these types of test in an effective, efficient way. We can work with your test plans, your engineering infrastructure etc to implement the test at our secure lab, extending your capability and product confidence.