Telco-Scale, Signal-Grade: Unblinking SOM Testing
At a glance
CLIENT
European telecom operator managing nationwide Service Order Management (SOM)
SERVICE
- Quality Engineering, Test Automation, Data & Environment Management
INDUSTRY
- Telecommunications
The operator’s SOM stack orchestrates 3.2–3.8 million orders/month (provisioning, migrations, suspends/resumes) across 40+ upstream/downstream systems. Releases happened quarterly with a fragile test pyramid: heavy manual regression, duplicated cases, and inconsistent environments. Average regression took 12–14 days, defect leakage into UAT sat at 8.7%, and environment-related test aborts consumed 14% of QA effort—delaying network rollouts and partner launches.
LeanCoded rebuilt Quality Engineering around risk-based design and automation. We introduced systematic test design (pairwise, boundary values, state transitions, decision tables), stabilized environments with synthetic data and service virtualization, and embedded contract testing around SOM interfaces. Within two releases, regression time dropped to 7.5 days (–39%), UAT leakage fell to 3.1% (–64%), and environment-caused aborts fell below 3%. Production incidents per release decreased by 41%, while throughput supported bi-weekly release trains.
Design for Coverage, Automate for Speed
We mapped the SOM domain (order capture → orchestration → fulfillment) and ranked risks by traffic, change frequency, and customer impact. A new test catalog used boundary analysis for product options, state transition models for order lifecycles (draft → validating → executing → completed/failed), and decision tables for pricing/eligibility. Acting as an api development company, we formalized versioned schemas for 28+ SOM interfaces and surrounded them with consumer-driven api integration support (mock servers, contract packs, partner sandboxes) to keep dependencies from blocking test runs.
Automation targeted what moves the needle: contract tests at the edge, workflow tests at the orchestration layer, and selective E2E for golden paths (new install, upgrade, move, suspend/resume). Our devops services provided paved roads—versioned test data, ephemeral environments, blue/green test lanes, and quality gates that block risky merges. A digital adoption platform embedded step-by-step guides into the QA portal; onboarding for new QE engineers dropped from 20 to 9 days, and “how do I run X suite?” tickets fell by 37%.
Stable Data and Environments—The Quiet Superpower of QE
We separated data concerns from tests: synthetic customer/product datasets cover edge tariffs and rare combinatorics; masked production snapshots feed performance baselines. Service virtualization replaced unavailable partners (logistics, credit check, legacy CRM), raising test environment availability from 82% to 97%. With targeted cloud cost optimization solutions (right-sized runners, schedule-based performance rigs, log tiering), non-prod spend decreased by 22% while sustaining 2.8× load for promo spikes. Mobile self-care scenarios joined the same cadence via mobile app development services, aligning app releases with SOM backend drops.
Regression in days, not weeks
Break contracts, not production
Environments that stay green
Quality where it matters
Cost that scales with value
What Changed for the Business
SOM releases no longer stall commercial timelines. Marketing can launch bundles on plan; network can schedule migrations without QA freeze weekends. LeanCoded combined platform guardrails and enablement: we acted as an api development company for shared contracts, provided api integration support to partners, delivered devops services for quality gates and ephemeral envs, and used a digital adoption platform to keep knowledge at the point of use.
- Speed — Regression –39%; bi-weekly trains
- Stability — UAT leakage –64%; prod incidents –41%
- Readiness — Env uptime 97%; aborts <3%
- Cost — Non-prod spend –22%
- Enablement — Onboarding 9 days; help-desk –37%
Next: Touchless Evidence and Portfolio Risk Heatmaps
We’re extending pipeline attestations (accessibility, security, privacy) to generate touchless audit evidence. Portfolio-level risk heatmaps will steer where automated depth increases next. Mobile parity continues through mobile app development services, while cloud cost optimization solutions (spot pools, storage lifecycle) maintain a flat cost curve as test volume grows.