One tricky aspect of getting automated call testing to work properly across different switches and deployments is that different delays and timeouts are required in various places throughout the script library. This is even harder when targeting different international phone systems.
For example, when we take a phone port off-hook, we sometimes have to be careful to avoid immediately performing operations on that port. It needs a slight delay when we’re on a VoIP system to give the RTP stream a chance to start. Otherwise if we slam it with DTMF right away we’ll lose a digit or two. On a pure POTS system, we can reduce the delay.
Sprinkling these delays throughout the script libraries would be a nightmare. When we port to a new deployment type, we’d have to hunt down all of the places with delays and tweak them individually — and then somehow maintain the two versions.
Instead we maintain the delays in a configuration file on the RCG-4001. The different delays are available as properties on the PhonePort objects used by the scripts in our suite. When we need to port to a new switch, we can create a new config file and tweak the delays in one place. This avoids tedious searching through scripts and keeps all of the tuning centralized.
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