Earlier this year, an infrastructure outage left North America’s BlackBerry users stranded for 3 hours, without wireless e-mail access. Some users welcomed a break from their “Crackberries,” but most were pretty steamed. This reaction, and the hundreds of headlines it generated, might seem over the top until you consider how dependent the world is on wireless devices.

Gehringer: Getting to the heart of a problem is critical to cost efficiencies.

Customers today expect nothing less than reliable service coupled with instant access to the latest technologies–voice, data, and e-mail–all from a single handheld device.

Faced with limitless customer demands and a struggling economy, wireless carriers are feeling the pain of delivering innovative, high-quality products. Each day brings increasingly complex devices, forcing carriers to conduct more extensive system testing – a process that is costly and time-consuming, and can lead to higher prices for already strapped consumers. Carriers looking to stay competitive need a way to test better and faster. Automatable test assets can help carriers meet these goals, while allowing them to get higher quality products to market first, at a lower cost than competitors.

To understand the solution, we first need to understand the problem. Carriers today recognize that quality wireless service is a requirement. They therefore insist on system testing – testing the device and the network – to ensure interoperability and maximum performance. During system testing, test engineers inevitably find hundreds of defects, all of which need to be resolved quickly to meet release deadlines. However, the bulk of their time is spent on finding an issue, communicating it to the manufacturer, waiting for it to be resolved, and then retesting – a process that can drag on for years.

To reduce this window, carriers need to adopt automation processes and tools to streamline interactions with manufacturers, so both sides can work together more effectively. But first they must adjust their notion of automation. Until recently, automation has been extremely company-centric – that is, it works in one company (sometimes in only one group) and nowhere else. Carriers now need to focus on creating technologies that are transferrable and that enable better communication. The solution is to build automatable test assets that can be  shared and universally understood.

With automatable test assets, manufacturers and carriers can save time and labor on both ends of the testing process, while delivering a higher quality product to market faster. These assets enable carriers to document and clearly articulate any problems, as well as share this information with manufacturers. Manufacturers can then save time trying to understand the problem and focus on providing a quick and effective solution to carriers.

At the end of the day, automatable test assets allow manufacturers and carriers to get their products to market with fewer costs, since they can reduce the amount of time spent on system testing. This benefit is passed on to consumers in the form of reasonable and competitive prices. In addition, manufacturers and carriers realize that even in a tough economy, consumers are not going to scrimp on quality – and neither should they. Providing high-quality products at reasonable prices is an effective way to keep customers. And when the economy recovers, these loyal customers will likely be more receptive to new services.

As leading telecommunication companies focus on designing next-generation networks, system testing will surely play a major part in the release cycle. Organizations that choose to leverage automatable test assets as part of this process have an opportunity to turn system testing into a valuable advantage. In addition to saving time and money, they will set themselves apart from competitors by delivering the reliability and quality their customers expect, at a price they can afford.

Gehringer is vice president of marketing for Fanfare.