Title:

Telstra FLEXCAB Billing System


Description:

A contract with Telstras' Flexible Charging and Billing (FLEXCAB) project and worked on the Pricing On-line application. Telstra management recognized that their existing billing system, CABS, possessed a number of weaknesses including the inflexibility of invoicing methods, inadequate facilities for reporting and the absence of international competitive architectures such as recording and processing Call Event data. FLEXCAB was designed to overcome these weaknesses and also to provide Telstra with a competitive edge in the newly formed deregulated market.

The Pricing On-line application was concerned with the Graphical User Interface of FLEXCAB and comprised some 50 cooperating windows and 100 or so database service routines. The windows were coded using Microsoft SDK for OS/2 1.3 PM using Foundation for Co-operative Processing (a case tool for client-server computing developed by Anderson Consultants) and unit tested under Windows 3.0.

The unit testing procedure was particularly detailed and required preparation of test data, documented test plans and input, expected and actual results for each conditional branch in the code. The windows to perform updates to the database called the database service routines. The routines were written in the same environment as above and unit tested in the same rigorous manner. The database underlying FLEXCAB was an ORACLE database running on a Novell NetWare Server. Towards the end of the project we serviced bug fixes requested by the application test team