White Paper Software the life blood to the Snom IP Telephone Snom software has a history of development and improvements spanning over 15 years and

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1 White Paper Software the life blood to the IP Telephone software has a history of development and improvements spanning over 15 years and provides the business professional with features and settings that make it powerful, flexible and versatile.

2 White Paper Software, the life blood to the IP Telephone Contents White Paper Software, the life blood to the IP Telephone... 2 Introduction... 2 Your Operating System... 3 Your Software Programme... 3 Why is Different... 3 Tailoring Telephones... 4 Agile Development Process... 4 Managing Quality... 5 SIP Compliance... 5 Quality Testing... 6 Automated Test Framework (ATF)... 6 Testing Security... 6 Testing Third Party Products... 6 Summary... 7 Introduction Just about everyone uses a computer in some way, shape or form on a daily basis, it is not just your laptop or computer itself, basic items such as a digital watch, the applications on your mobile phones, and the IP phone on your desktop all owe their capabilities to the power of their software. Software is the enabler of the usefulness and functionality of even simple devices, none of these machines could function without the programming that gives them life. Essentially all programs and applications are a set of instructions designed to create particular outcomes. There are at least three components in play in every computer driven device, including your telephone. Firstly the hardware which is actually what most people think of when talking about their telephone, and the design of which can effect the performance, quality and reliability of the device. (The hardware and the decisions we make regarding our hardware is discussed in more detail in our white paper Engineered in Germany ). Secondly the operating system software that manages the telephones memory, processes, and all of its software and hardware. The final of the three components of any computerized task is the specific software program that has been written to handle the required work. This third component is the lifeblood of your telephone and its reliability, resilience and capabilities provide a strong differentiator.

3 Your Operating System The two operating systems of choice in today s market are Microsoft Windows and Unix. uses Linux, a Unix operating system that has been adapted to work with the phone and tailored to minimise the amount of processing power and memory required. Unix was designed in 1968 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, who were working as engineers at Bell Laboratories at the time. The hundreds of individual programs which go to make up a Unix operating system were developed in an open environment, where sharing code was always encouraged. This has meant that ideas on how to build software have improved incrementally, by sharing, by the contributions of hundreds of thousands of programmers. Errors in the code (inevitable in all computer programming) are quickly identified by other programmers, and fixed. Better ways of doing things can be refactored into the code by other developers and then shared back to the project coordinators. This leads inevitably to a very robust and efficient system. In addition to its efficiency, chose Linux because of its reliability and excellent design. As an innovator, requires maximum flexibility to introduce new features and capabilities and Linux s complete transparency provides this flexibility. All system and configuration files are readable, and the source code for all systems software is available. There is no limit to the depth of capabilities we can develop, if we have the time and inclination to do so. Your Software Programme 20 years ago developed the first SIP telephone handset. Our software which is written in C++ software has a long history of development and improvements spanning over 15 years. produces a professional phone and a business phone; the handset can do almost anything and has long been recognised as best of class. The software provides its intelligence, a huge set of features that might be useful to the business professional. In addition to its SIP interoperability and rich feature set the telephone is easy to set up, easy to provision, easy to use and highly flexible. Since the very first version of software/firmware, there has been constant and ongoing development always focused on being open to a wide variety of IT SPs and being interoperable with a wide range of IP-PBX platforms. Many SIP manufacturers use s SIP developments as the reference for their own developments. is a feature leader, once something new such as TR69, IPv6, VPN and Lync is introduced is among the first to market with compatible telephones, providing customers with support for these latest features. Why is Different s Software development team is different they are all based in Berlin and have an extensive technology knowledge base and a strong history of working with software. The majority are long term employees, working together and getting involved with major projects, receiving real input from the field, that allow them to understand, test, evaluate, fix and to get things working.

4 s software approach is different has a modular approach to software development, the same firmware is seamlessly supported on different/older/newer models. devices using the same firmware results in a longer life for telephone models and support for products continues for 2 years beyond end of sales of the product. support and updates are free and there are no licence fees. Once a version of firmware is released, it is provided for every current phone model, differences in features supported are dependent on hardware but there is no need for customers to look for the latest releases. The same provisioning processes are in place for all handsets and aim to make it easy for our customers to stay on the latest version. This approach makes it simple for administrators particularly those who have a mixed telephone model environment where updates are simplified. It is also important for. It simplifies the Software development process while at the same time increasing the importance of having clean and well-written code. It creates a clear differentiator between and every other telephone manufacturer. s feature approach is different - all phones run on the same software but they have a variety of features and telephones are extremely feature rich. continually adds new features and supports new protocols, and customer requests drive ongoing changes. Parts of the phone have to be customised because phones have different capabilities, displays and numbers of buttons, for example, the GUI is customised per phone type. Other parts like the SIP stack are essentially the same on every phone. Using common software on devices ensures that we get rapid feedback, which quickly highlights any problems so that they can be resolved and this in turn increases the reliability of the software for everyone. Tailoring Telephones s software is highly customisable, we want to work with any switch/sip server and although SIP is a standard there are still interoperability challenges, and different customers have different user interface requirements. Therefore, we have developed an approach that means the phone works out of the box but every telephone is also highly customisable via a large number of settings that the customer can change if they want to change the behaviour of the phone. Some of these controls are easy and some are more complex and need expertise, therefore we also provide training to explain the more complicated settings and provide on online wiki where settings are explained. We also support APIs and outside ACD applications that can configure the phone. Agile Development Process Software Development embraces Agile Development. The Agile Manifesto is based on 12 principles: Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of useful software Welcome changing requirements, even late in development Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months) Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers

5 Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location) Working software is the principal measure of progress Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design Simplicity the art of maximizing the amount of work not done is essential Self-organizing teams Regular adaptation to changing circumstance identified the need to be more agile and adopted Agile Software Development principles to be able to reduce bugs, and process customer requests and error reports more quickly. It works on a 3-week cycle that is designed to achieve an optimum balance of meetings and work flow and reduces the customer driven interruptions to the development workflow. It results in a software build that is reliable and stable and that has been tested in the field. aims to provide 4 releases per year plus modifications for new phone models, that may require changes in the software. Managing Quality Quality has always been one of the corner stones of the approach to IP Telephony and software quality is entirely under our control since products are developed and tested entirely in house. This approach ensures we have a complete picture and full control of the situation around our software and can ensure it performs to our standards, and our customers expectations. employs strict quality control and assurance processes to maintain standards in our products and services. We have a team of employees based in our Headquarters in Berlin who focus on testing and related third party products, such as headsets. Their responsibility is to ensure products are performing to the highest possible standards as defined by the SIP standard, and by the specification provided by the product management team to the developers. In addition to manual testing have developed an automated test system and test framework. SIP Compliance The IETF SIP Working Group has been chartered to be the "owner" of the SIP protocol and the protocol today is still constantly evolving. Since telephones work with a wide variety of IP PBX vendors and service providers it is important to our continued interoperability that products fully comply with changes and developments in the SIP standard. We therefore follow changes to the standard carefully and continually validate our software against any changes. However, this is not just a matter of testing the SIP elements. It has to be tested individually on every phone model to ensure it does not cause conflicts with the current software or with previous versions of the implementation of SIP that our customers may still be using their networks.

6 Quality Testing Many of the quality tests performed on telephones are by necessity manual. For each phone to be manually tested takes approximately one-person week. If you consider the number of phone types that are selling at any point in time plus the items we continue to support for our 2-year maintenance period beyond the time when a product becomes end of sale, it can be seen that a considerable effort is involved. We also test multiple releases, while it is our hope that all telephone users will upgrade to the latest software, we understand that if there are no new features or fixes needed by the client they may choose not to upgrade, therefore we need to continue to test previous software versions. There are tests that will always require human intervention; this includes areas like text recognition on screens and listening for audio quality. However, some testing is suitable for automation. In addition to our experts in quality testing we have mature software people with years of experience that have a full time job building our Automatic Test Framework - ATF. Automated Test Framework (ATF) Some software testing tasks, such as extensive low-level interface testing, can be laborious and time consuming to do manually. In addition, a manual approach might not always be effective in finding certain classes of defects. Test automation offers a possibility to perform these types of testing effectively. Once automated tests have been developed, they can be run quickly and repeatedly. Even minor patches over the lifetime of the software can cause existing features to break which were working at an earlier point in time. ATF is based on an open source framework and has been modified heavily by our quality team to meet our specific requirements. ATF runs about 550 tests each night on each telephone in the range. We have a laboratory set up with telephones and the ATF tests each function in sequence. It runs through all the requirements of SIP plus of the features of the software. As part of s Agile Development process a new automated test is written for every new feature and bug fix undergoes, so the ATF is under constant development. Testing Security s telephony security is outstanding. Security is of particular significance to our customers and therefore of particular importance to us, and we have within our Quality team a specialist resource whose responsibility it is monitor new developments by hackers and to stay up to date on new security concerns such as risks, holes, warnings and problems and discuss these with the development team. Together they review the security protection in place and determine what further development is needed to avoid security risks. The very close relationship between Quality specialists and software developers is a critical element that enables this process, and is based on a strong foundation of experience and respect. Testing Third Party Products

7 The Quality team also tests third party products such as accessories and headsets. OEM devices are all manually tested. Testing ensures that they are compatible and interoperate with. Signalling to the phone is different for each model and manufacturer and testing has to be redone every time a vendor brings out new version. If the tests fail then the product manager and the developers work together to find out why and resolve the problem. Summary software is truly our life blood. We know that our customers depend on our telephones and therefore we know it is our responsibility to ensure that software is healthy and that the code is kept clean and easy to develop and to troubleshoot. software is mature having been developed over 15 years and it does not have the bugs found in most immature software, this means that it is stable and our customers can depend on it. It is also exceptionally feature rich and powerful and we are justifiably proud of our software and of the remarkable team of experts and professionals that make up our Software Development and Quality teams. Technology AG Wittestr. 30 G Berlin Phone Fax office.de@snom.com