The operational software of the 5ESS™ switching system has been designed to meet specific objectives for capacity, functionality, and reliability. It has also been designed to accommodate changing technology, changing system applications, and an ever-increasing feature application set. Structured pro gramming techniques, high-level languages, and modular design techniques have been used to obtain these objectives. Specifically, the operational software architecture is organized as a set of functional software components utilizing the advantages of a generalized operating system and database manager to achieve a high degree of hardware independence. A primary cause for hardware churning is the introduction of new peripheral units in support of new feature applications. The peripheral control software shields the majority of the operational software from these changes. Standardized and locally well-defined interfaces to the operations support systems provide information to the customer for the administration and maintenance of the switching system.

This paper describes factory system testing for the 5ESS™ switch. Factory system testing is performed using standard maintenance and diagnostic features of the 5ESS switch. The design of the factory system testing process is based on the distributed architecture of the 5ESS switch and is described in this paper. The system-level requirements that each 5ESS switch must meet before shipment to the field are also discussed.

Large amounts of data about every customer line number and billing number in the country must be available for the Stored Program Controlled (spc) Network features to operate. A method of obtaining, organizing, and cleansing the data or administering the necessary network data bases was needed. While much of the data could be obtained through each telephone company's service order system, these systems vary substantially in capabilities from one company to another and even from one region to another of the same company. To obtain the data, a new support system called the No. 2 Data Base Administration System (dbas) was designed and new operational procedures for the telephone companies were developed. The dbas interacts with all types of service order systems to obtain the data; provides initial load, as well as immediate and routine updates for the network data bases; and handles customer queries, statistics, special studies and other administrative functions off‐line for the data bases. This minicomputer‐based system bridges the gap between the telephone company paper flow and the spc network. The dbas provides reliable data in a timely fashion to the network to ensure the viability of the initial features. It provides a general capability for administration of additional customer data which may be required for future spc network features.

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