The Challenge: Unifying Security, Connectivity, and Performance with High Quality Enterprise Network Appliances
SonicWall has been fighting the cybercriminal industry for decades defending small and medium businesses, global enterprises, and government agencies worldwide. Their award-winning, real-time breach detection and prevention solutions secure more than one million networks in over 215 countries and territories.
SonicWall’s solutions in this space are varied and tell a complete story for unifying network security, connectivity, and performance for their customers. Their firewalls including the Network Security appliance (NSa) and Network Security virtual (NSv) series are critical for providing a cost-effective method for consolidating these needs. Rigorous testing of these products during continuous development is what gives SonicWall’s customers the quality they demand.
“SonicWall always puts product quality as our first priority,” said Gavin Liu, QA Automation Director at SonicWall. “As a network security vendor, we test our products inside and out. We especially need to verify, at the packet level, that our firewalls conform to all TCP/IP protocols. It’s a very important area.”
Having a priority for producing robust, quality products through testing, especially in security, required an automation tool that was up to the challenge.
The Solution: Fully Automated, Comprehensive, and Customizable Test Coverage with CDRouter
QA Cafe’s CDRouter, the industry standard test platform for enterprise edge and Wi-Fi devices has been the obvious choice for Sonicwall for many years. CDRouter is a complete software solution for automated testing, built on high-end hardware dedicated to testing features, performance, and security.
“My team works on automation infrastructure and framework development for all SonicWall product lines,” said Gavin. “The CDRouter test cases are part of our build verification test suites. We’ve been using CDRouter for about 15 years, so it plays an important role in our development process.”
Sonicwall’s products implement a wide variety of technologies and features. To make sure they get full coverage, their development process uses the expert-developed tests present in CDRouter, plus a set of custom tests they developed using CDRouter’s framework.
“We run all applicable out-of-box test cases from CDRouter for every build,” Gavin said. “The CDRouter test packages are quite comprehensive. Tests for DHCP, NAT, ICMP, DNS, RIP, ARP, scaling, and firewall features are all run automatically without any test coding from us. For the custom tests we do need, we were easily able to write our own based on CDRouter’s libraries and include them in our automation environment.”
“We release our builds to QA testing only if the CDRouter tests have passed.”
A Platform that Continuously Improves with World-Class Support
“What’s more, QA Cafe’s support team is excellent,” said Gavin. “We have contacted them many times and are never disappointed. They always give us a prompt response with accurate answers. The CDRouter development team is also continuously improving the product and they keep us updated with the latest releases and provide webinars on existing and new features. We’ve learned a lot from their webinars”.
“There are other testing tools available on the market,” Gavin concluded, “but we found that CDRouter has the best test coverage and is easiest to use.”
"THERE ARE OTHER TESTING TOOLS AVAILABLE ON THE MARKET, BUT WE FOUND THAT CDROUTER HAS THE BEST TEST COVERAGE AND IS EASIEST TO USE."
- Gavin Liu, QA Automation Director at SonicWall
