Cloud Testing - The Future of Software Testing

In this blog, we will go deep to understand what is cloud testing, the types of cloud testing, it's benefits, the major challenges, cloud testing strategy, cloud-based software testing tool, and the future of software testing.

So, let's start with what is cloud testing?

Cloud testing is a method of software testing that renders various cloud computing services such as software, hardware, and other computing devices. Over the last decades, traditional ways to test a software incurs a high cost to simulate user activity from multiple locations. The majority of applications were running on client/server architecture, and data was tightly coupled with applications in client/server architecture. Then the World Wide Web came along with N-tier application architecture where developers could create flexible and reusable applications. By segregating an application into tiers, developers acquired the option of modifying or adding a specific layer, instead of reworking the entire application. Technology innovation has further provided web access to people on the go via laptops and mobile devices.

Testing firewalls and load balancers involve the expenditure on hardware, software and its maintenance. In the case of applications where the rate of increase in a number of users is unpredictable or there is variation in deployment environment depending on client requirements, cloud testing is more effective.

Software testing has also undergone a long-drawn evolution cycle. From ad hoc practices within different business units, it gradually evolved into a centralized Managed Test Center approach. However, the testing paradigm has changed and there are major challenges that need to be overcome, such as infrastructure availability, complexity, and increasing costs. Traditional application testing has its own limitations as well, like latency, performance, concurrency, planning, and extremely expensive execution costs.

As technology innovation continues to make software available on various platforms and devices, software quality assurance has also caught up with the latest digital trends with its own innovation. Cloud testing is a game-changer and surpasses the challenges faced with traditional testing. Setting up the cloud testing service is very straight forward for any organization: develop user scenarios, design test cases, select cloud services provider, set up infrastructure, leverage cloud servers, start testing, monitor testing goals and deliver results.

Cloud Testing - The Future of Software Testing

The field of software testing is undergoing continuous evolution. With the ongoing developments in technology, software testing experts have come up with the latest trends for the software testing industry.

In the field of software testing, the year 2020 will witness a shift from performance testing to performance engineering. Performance engineering will focus on important elements like configuration quality, convenience, practicality of use, and customer value in order to provide enhanced customer experiences.

Cloud testing is under constant evolution and is continuously bringing in new opportunities and challenges. Moving to a test to the cloud is more cost-effective for any organization as long as it does not include sensitive data and there is minimal impact on the organization’s business activities. Some may have the opinion that small business units will harness public clouds, while large enterprises will leverage private clouds for their cloud-based testing services. Whether the company is large or small though, the road to cloud-based testing is paved with its own set of challenges.

Some Cloud Computing Statistics That You Should Know

1. According to Gartner study, it has estimated that the end-user spending on cloud services will jump to $3.4 billion by end of 2020, 25% more than the 2019.

2. This growth in 2020 will position India to number 3, just behind China and Indonesia in end-user spending on public cloud services.

3. As per IDC report, It is estimated that by the end of 2025, worldwide data will grow 61% to 175 zettabytes data will be stored in cloud.

4. Cisco forecasts that global data center traffic will triple from 2.6 zettabytes in 2012 to 7.7 zettabytes annually in 2017, representing a 25 percent CAGR.

5. Gartner has estimated, by the end of 2021, 3/4th of midsize and large organizations will have adopted multi-cloud or hybrid strategy.

Benefits of Cloud Testing

Cloud testing has clearly emerged as a winner in the software development life-cycle (SDLC) and proven beneficial to the quality assurance (QA) team. Below we have tried to highlight the benefits of cloud testing, which demonstrates why cloud testing is the need of the hour.

More Economical and Cost-Effective

Who knows better than the QA team the high cost incurred to test an application and fix the bugs that emerge, if any.

The total cost of cloud-based testing is very low related to traditional testing that an organization can save 70% in cloud testing against the traditional testing model.

Also, cloud-based testing tools reduce IT management investment and operational costs to traditional tools. With less IT management efforts to implement, employees concentrate more on core exercises that make a difference to an organization.

Cloud testing speed up testing and software release against traditional testing. The QA team gets instant feedback on whether the application is bug-free and ready to deploy or not.

Unlimited Availability of Cloud

An organization is required to invest in hardware and software infrastructure, the basic necessity for any organization or QA team for testing. One of the major advantages of the cloud is that a user can access their resources from any device, only they need internet connectivity regardless of time and location. Testers can easily test from different locations and access test reports from anywhere in the world without the pain of uploading and downloading them. Going back to the first benefits of cloud testing, i.e. cost-effective testing, means that investment in hardware and software is no longer a priority for an organization.

You must agree with us that the environment provided to the testing teams is completely different than the clients' environment, as a result, it becomes challenging for the team to match the requirement. Cloud is the only solution to this problem whereby, users can easily replicate a customer environment and find defects early in the cycle.

Time Saving

With cloud-based testing, the QA team can run an application simultaneously on different hardware devices irrespective of time and location. So, the tester can give more time on fixing defects.

Scalability

Scalability in cloud testing is considered as one of the important quality concerns of performance whereby computing resources are allocated to maintain application executions following a usage-based approach whereby computing resources can be increased or decreased wherever it is necessary. This is very useful approach when the clients frequently changes their business requirement. Built upon the conventional concepts of distributed resource management, cloud computing presents new scalability features.

Stakeholders in a cloud-based system have different performance concerns from their perspectives including infrastructure providers, software service providers, and end-users. From the infrastructure providers’ perspective, resource utilization is important. That is, it can timely release sources so that the system can re-allocate to other applications and customers. From the service providers’ perspective, it needs to balance between system performance and cost of resource reservation. If resources are reserved more than needed, they have to pay for wasteful resources. If resources are reserved less than needed, they cannot guarantee service availability and response time.

Customizable

The cloud gives you the chance to test various courses to a system. The QA team performs the load and performance testing on each situation to determine how all permutations and combinations will impact the program on a specific device.

This flexibility helps the team to take the decision of what actions need to be taken to make the software more compatible with a specific device.

Cloud testing can give an assortment of advantages to organizations as they move to agile cycles. By consolidating this methodology in QA test management workflows, teams can move quicker and accomplish significant advantages.

Cloud Testing Faces Challenges

Although cloud-based testing brings many benefits to fix the issues and improve the quality of products. Because of these common challenges of testing in a cloud environment stopping the organizations venturing into the cloud. But, this type of testing also brings the challenges that need to be considered beforehand.

Let's have a close look at the operational challenges that the QA team has to overcome before they take advantage of cloud testing. Take below a look at some of the major challenges tester deals with it:

Security:

While the cloud environment offers you to access the data irrespective of time and location with a ready back-up and a robust recovery plan. The security of confidential data is still a major concern for organizations as the encryption technique is far from perfection. Another drawback of outsourcing on the cloud is that the vendors are not familiar with security needs and industry standards that are unique to government agencies, and their data are stored beyond the company's legal jurisdiction.

Another challenge in this space is that we ay come up with a situation where we can not access the data over the cloud due to the leak of private information or internet suspension due to a virus attack, internet speed, or government nodes.

Choosing a vendor that works in this space will be essential to ensure that an organizations can test the application while following the norms and keeping the data protected from potential breaches.

Service Agreement:

Vendors of cloud-based service providers often describe the terms and conditions of their cloud service that differentiate the responsibilities of vendors and users but sometimes that comes misleadingly. Considering specific services are moving on the cloud is outsourced by the third party. Pay close attention to such integrity.

Another common issue that organizations face comes from the level of the cloud service provider. After all, if you are providing your data to the cloud, you need to make sure that it can be accessed without experiencing any undue delay. These challenges will mainly depend on the provider's capabilities. By choosing a reliable provider, you can have better peace of mind.

Integration Testing:

Some applications are required to connect with other cloud-based applications in the testing process. The process gets slower if an application is already running and is integrated with another application in production.

While robust testing frameworks and strategies help enterprises get the most of their investment in the Cloud, there are a set of challenges related to testing on the Cloud. The foremost factor to focus on while testing is to ensure that the specific functional requirements are addressed.

Lack of Expertise:

One of the challenges of the most common cloud the organizations and vendors are facing is the lack of expertise and skilled resources. Organizations are facing a hard time keeping up with tools and expertise.

Types of Cloud Testing:

Cloud testing works on both functional and non-functional testing and is divided into four major categories. Testing in the cloud can be done in both new and traditional way. Let's start with each type of cloud testing:

Whole Cloud Testing

In this level of test, the cloud is considered as a whole entity on its own, and what set of features it offers.

Testing within Cloud

The test is being carried out by looking at each of the internal features. Such type of cloud testing is being performed by cloud vendors only.

Testing Across Cloud

Such type of cloud testing is performed on different types of cloud-like private, public, and hybrid clouds.

SaaS Cloud Testing

In this type, cloud testing is divided into two categories, carried out based on application requirements i.e. functional and non-functional.

Here is Some Cloud-based Testing Tool:

SOASTA Cloud Test

LoadStorm

BlazeMeter

Nessus

App Thwack

Xamarin Test Cloud

How V2Soft Software Testing Services Works

V2Soft provides end-to-end independent validation and verification services to support ongoing maintenance releases for new enhancements including regression, functional testing and performance testing.

V2Soft envisions the automated regression testing by implementing a robust framework using Selenium tool. The framework will provide the core structure which include Selenium and externalize the testing data and business flow configuration. The core framework will be developed using opensource technology.

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