Ensuring Interoperability with Automated Interoperability Testing

This white paper presents a new approach to achieve interoperability via the automation of interoperability testing. Over the past years, interoperability testing has become more and more attractive in standardization and industry to ensure delivery of services across products from different vendors. Today interoperability testing is still largely performed in a time consuming and resource intensive manual manner. We introduce here the work done at ETSI to automate this form of testing and show that it can also be used to assess the compliance of products to specifications and standards. The work has already shown to yield significant cost reductions in industrial and standardization case studies. We explain here why automation is desirable, how automation can be achieved, and present examples of its successful applications.