Carrier Grade Starts with Finding and Fixing Software Defects Before Deployment

Did you know 25% to 50% of deployed device failures are due to software defects? This statistic should be nowhere near this high, considering there are a few very good solutions out there today to help reduce the number of defects in software code.

In the networking and telecom industry, if equipment fails and brings down the network it can cost a service provider or operator millions of dollars in lost revenue or even lost customers (read this white paper to learn more). If you are an equipment provider and the failure is associated with your application, the lost revenue cost could very well be passed on to you. And count on the network failure to be all over the headline news like the one that hit the New York Times.

To prevent these kinds of failures many equipment providers build carrier grade features and functionality into their products. Equipment with "carrier grade" characteristics can achieve 99.999% (five nines) availability. Putting this in terms we all understand, carrier grade equipment experiences less than three minutes of downtime per year. Non-carrier grade equipment can experience anywhere from 30 to 300 minutes of downtime per year.   This is a huge difference.

One of the key characteristics of a carrier grade network element is reliability. Increased application reliability can be achieved through tools that help to identify and debug software defects in network elements and applications before they deploy in the field.  Check out this demo of the Wind River Test Management solution.

Do you build carrier grade equipment?  What steps do you take to ensure your equipment or applications are highly reliable?  How much of your development process is spent on testing software? Do you use automated software testing tools?