IVR Crawler Reverse Engineering Call Flows
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current interactive voice response (IVR) system documentation is time-consuming and often out of sync with production systems, requiring significant resources and resulting in compromised agility and prolonged time-to-value.
Innovation Solution
The development of IVR crawling systems, including speech, DTMF, and design crawlers that reverse engineer call flows, build test case libraries, and facilitate automated testing, enabling rapid navigation and documentation of production IVR systems.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If manual documentation methods are used to document IVR systems, then comprehensive documentation can be achieved, but the process becomes extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates automated copies of IVR system behavior through crawler software that replicates user interactions and generates documentation automatically. The crawler traverses the IVR system, captures call flows, and produces documentation without manual intervention, thus achieving comprehensive documentation coverage while dramatically reducing the time required.
Solution Approach 2:
The IVR system documents itself through the automated crawler that independently navigates the system, captures its own call flows, and generates documentation. This self-service approach eliminates the need for external manual documentation efforts while maintaining complete and accurate records of system behavior.
2Productivity
If automated crawling is used to navigate IVR systems, then documentation speed is improved, but system performance may be negatively impacted
Solution Approach 1:
The crawler operates in periodic batches rather than continuously, scheduling documentation runs during off-peak hours or maintenance windows. This periodic operation allows the system to maintain normal performance during business hours while still achieving comprehensive documentation updates regularly, thus balancing productivity gains with system performance requirements.
3Reliability
If comprehensive testing of all possible paths is performed, then system reliability is improved, but the complexity and time required increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The crawler performs preliminary exploration of the IVR system to map all possible call flow paths before executing comprehensive tests. By预先 identifying the complete state space and valid transitions, the system can then systematically test each path without encountering unexpected complexity during execution, ensuring thorough reliability verification while managing testing complexity through structured preliminary analysis.
Data Source
AI summary
A system for interactive voice response system crawling, comprising an IVR crawler that may be VXML, design specification, DTMF or ASR/NLSR speech-based in nature and traverses an IVR menu to discover possible interaction paths and produces test cases based on those paths, and a database that stores test cases produced by the IVR crawler during operation, and a method for interactive voice response system crawling utilizing the IVR crawler of the invention.