How Cloud-based Testing Prompts Digital Transformation

In the past few years, IT has seen an evolution of virtualization in the form of cloud computing and as a model that sees everything “As a Service”. With the use of virtualization, the plan of sharing computing resources over multiple operating systems to increase scalability, reduce costs, and allow easy administration of IT infrastructure, has become a reality. Cloud-based testing can stimulate application development and help enterprises fit their Digital Next goals.

Cloud-based-testing

The cloud-based environment for software testing allows testing in various environments. Projects that need large infrastructure with a limited test budget and have strict deadlines, cost management focus, with limited or no reuse of tests can leverage cloud testing.

The presence of global users, the requirement for high-quality service delivery, and avoiding outages are some of the other challenges that indicate the need for testing outside the datacentre. Cloud-based testing is the possible solution to all these problems. Cloud-based testing also gives effective unlimited storage, adaptability, and availability of distributed testing environment, quick availability of the infrastructure with scalability, diminishing the execution time of testing of large applications and thereby, costs.

Additionally, the effective practice of virtualized resources and shared cloud infrastructure results in eliminating redundant computer resources and software licensing costs in a test laboratory. Cloud-based testing decreases the testing setup time from weeks to minutes. A QA organization can simply leverage scalable cloud system infrastructure to monitor and evaluate the system.

Features of Cloud-based Testing

• Supports a kind of end-to-end testing

Combines the strength of functional test automation, performance testing, API/Web service testing, and security testing.

• Integrates with Continuous Delivery tools

Promotes Continuous Integration (Jenkins, TFS, etc.)

Integrates to SOAP UI, OWASP, JMeter, ZAP

Helps complete mobile web automation scripts over multiple devices

• Integrates with Cloud services

Integrates with Cloud services like Sauce Labs for Mobile, Web testing, and parallel cross-browser testing with no extra scripting.

Diminishes test automation effort by 20% through pre-defined general test scripts.

Cloud Testing Environments

There are three kinds of Cloud testing environments where the quality of applications deployed requires to be validated. Performing software testing in the cloud indicates accessing the flexible self-service infrastructure that is received off-premises (public cloud), behind the corporate firewall, and in a hybrid cloud.

What to look out for in Cloud-based Testing

• Interaction among the components: Cloud-based testing can become challenging when there has to be an interaction among the components because the tester will have to predict risks like crashes, network, and breakdown.
• Integration testing: Testers can lack control across the underlying environment in integration testing while testing the database,  network, servers, etc.
• Interoperability with public cloud providers: Presently, there are no universal/standard solutions to combine public cloud resources with user companies’ internal datacentre resources. Public cloud providers have their own architecture, operating models, and pricing tools and allow little or no interoperability. This poses a huge challenge for corporations once they switch vendors.
• Performance of an application in private clouds: It will be assigned across many users and hence could commence delays. Also, just in case of some maintenance or outage-related exercises, the bandwidth could be insufficient.
• Data integrity: Cloud storage migrates the user’s data to large datacentres which are remotely placed and on which the user does not have any power. This unique characteristic of the cloud poses many new security challenges which need to be clearly understood and fixed. As the data is physically not accessible to the user, the cloud should allow the user to see if the integrity of the data is secured or is compromised.
• Availability: The cloud-based service/application/environment should be available all the time, particularly the business-critical ones. Service unavailability affects service assurance.
• Acceptability: This defines whether an organization is ready to use a cloud-based environment owing to safety and other reasons. What pledge does an existing business rely on that their third-party solution is appropriate for its intended use? An organization can quickly leverage scalable cloud infrastructure to examine and evaluate system (SaaS/ Cloud/ Application) performance and scalability.

Delivery Models for Cloud

The cloud has essentially three delivery models that present “as a Service” capabilities.

• Software as a Service (SaaS)[Consume]: The first layer is the application layer which is apparent to the end-user. Here, the applications are available to the users on-demand via the internet. Therefore, instead of getting licenses for a particular user, it shows to be the most cost-effective way of ensuring that the license is always in use. Examples are Gmail, Google docs, etc.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)[Build]: The middle layer in the cloud is the platform layer. In this, there is no control across the underlying infrastructure, but deployed applications can be utilized. Hence, this gives the entire environment on demand which could be a staging or test environment. Hence, in this model, the resource is a VM that comprises the complete environment like OS, browsers, and other middleware, etc., and available when it is needed by a user.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)[Migrate]: This is a significant layer that makes the building block of the cloud. It mainly includes physical devices such as storage, network devices, other servers, etc. All these resources are available on-demand, where a user spends as per the cloud service usage.

Types of Testing Performed in the Cloud

1. Automation Testing – The users require to ensure that the automation suites are designed and produced with minimal changes within the cloud.
2. Performance Testing – Check the network latency and reaction time, load balancing, peak request number by hosting subscriptions in various data centers across the world. Appending to those, traditional load and stress testing are needed to validate business situations within the cloud model in terms of changing dynamic load and stress on the application under test.
3. Availability Testing – Cloud offering should be available 24*7 for the company or a user.
4. Scalability Testing – Cloud providers offer choices to increase or decrease the needed cloud configurations as per requirement. Most cloud services have choices to choose licenses on a month-on-month basis.
5. Accessibility Testing – Check user groups over different geographic locations are accessible to the cloud at any time without any problem.
6. System integration testing (SIT) – This is performed to confirm that the cloud solution will operate within this infrastructure and environment, showing that the integration of multiple application modules can be simply and efficiently tested.
7. User Acceptance Testing (UAT) – Testing is done to check the present provided cloud solution from the vendor satisfies the business requirements of an organization.
8. Interoperability Testing – Migration from one cloud to another cloud provider should have the needed flexibility. Technically, it should not be a dilemma if a business/user is moving from one cloud infrastructure to another one.
9. Disaster Recovery Testing – Recovery option available in case a system fails to operate under high load/volume of data, system failures, hardware failures, Network outage, insufficient bandwidth as per SLA. Also, it requires to be verified that if there is any data loss through this process and the amount of time it uses to report failure.
10. Security Testing – All sensitive and critical information which are going to be stored in the cloud will be extremely secure in nature. As privacy is also an important area in the cloud from the user viewpoint, it is important to check the privacy of the application users and associated information when managed in the cloud.

Conclusion

Using the cloud for testing is benefiting companies to speed up testing, get software licenses, and present infrastructure at a significantly lower cost without ought to set it up and later worry about capacity utilization.

Apparently, the cloud is a requirement and cloud-based testing is excellent for every test organization to satisfy technological challenges and save precious time.

TestUnity is a SaaS-based technology platform that is managed by a vast community of tester and QA spread around the globe. We give an end-to-end software testing cycle and ensure the best results. Testunity operates with a mission to bring down the cost of testing without endangering the quality of the product. TestUnity has expertise in all testing domains and processes. We will help you in getting better and efficient testing results without spending much of your software testing. Testunity helps in producing the project on time and without any bugs or issues without the requirement to spend much on testing. Contact us now to get in touch with one of the most efficient software testing company in the world.

TestUnity

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform driven by a vast community of testers & QAs spread around the world, powered by technology & testing experts to create the dedicated testing hub. Which is capable of providing almost all kind of testing services for almost all the platforms exists in software word.