IVR Stress Test

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

There are many sip testing apps out there, but I’m researching ways to stress test IVR functionality. I’ve got a pretty basic IVR demo setup and need an automated stress test. IVR flow is as follows:

  1. Caller calls #.
  2. ‘enter your acct #’ message is heard.
  3. acct # is read via dtmf.
  4. db dip to validate acct #.
    5a) if acct # is valid, then…
    ‘please hold for the next avail rep’ msg is heard.
    5b) if acct # is not valid, then… ‘sorry we can’t help you, please try again’ msg is heard

So for the purposes of testing, I can replace the audio messages with dtmf responses, but I’d prefer to keep the test IVR as is. How to interpret the audio success/failure messages? The only thing I can think of is to “train” the test app by making a success call and a failure call (by intentially entering a bad acct #), recording the 2 audio files, and then comparing the audio files on subsequent calls. However, that seems like a pretty hokey way to do it. If there was a solid way to speech to text the message and then do a key phrase text compare, then maybe it would work.

Any ideas? Anyone ever something similar?

thanks,
Will

2

It is not clear to me what you want to test with the stress test of the ivr. For a proper reaction you have to be more specific. Asterisk installed on a proper server will be capable of handling lots of incoming calls routed into an ivr and it is not the ivr that set the constraints.

3

I apologize for being unclear.

We have a 3rd party call center system (ivr, dialer, acd). I’ve been looking into a platform to test the ivr functionality. There are plenty of sip/h323 apps out there that seem to just test the call control signalling. What I’d like to do is actually programmatically step through the ivr, simulating an actual caller – sending dtmf to simulate selecting ivr menu options.

Of course, I can use call files or an agi script to generate calls, but just generating a bazillion calls is not enough for me. I actually want to intelligently interpret the ivr responses to my dtmf events so that I can branch to the appropriate next step.

Does that make more sense?

What methods are available for interpreting an audio message from the ivr system, and branching to 1 or more dtmf responses based on the content of that message? With the end result being that I can stress test the ivr system by simulating real callers?

thanks,
Will