As organizations adopt Agile processes, quality has taken center-stage in the race for faster, better, and cheaper. There is a keen desire to update processes that make testing more effective and cost-efficient.
While cloud testing is by no means a new practice, it has emerged as a highly popular one with its on-demand delivery model. With easy access to servers, storage, database, and many other resources used via the internet, cloud-based testing is ideal for multi-location, distributed Agile and DevOps teams who work and save changes in real-time.
In fact, the Global Cloud Testing Market size is expected to reach $11.4 billion by 2023, growing at a rate of 13.2% CAGR during the forecast period. There are many reasons for this growth in the
market size for cloud testing. Apart from the obvious cost benefits though, cloud testing offers many advantages like flexibility, scalability, reduced time to market, etc. Here’s taking a detailed look at some of its benefits.
Sectors like retail and eCommerce, IT and telecom, Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance(BFSI) are some of the main consumers of cloud testing solutions and services. Here are some of the primary reasons to opt for cloud testing:
Advantages of Cloud Testing
The need for cloud testing has grown over the years and there are some compelling arguments in favor of using cloud testing.
1. Low cost and greater ROI: Traditional test management approach has a much higher total cost of ownership. Companies might not even be using many of the servers all the time and yet the pay incurs additional per-user license expenses. With the on-demand cloud testing model, there is minimal capital investment and depreciation.
Additionally, cloud-based tools are highly scalable and reusable that makes them a better choice for load and performance testing. With pay-per-use, you only end up paying as per your requirements and scale up or down easily.
2. All-time availability: Testers can access resources anytime and from any location if they have an active connection. This is also important to simulate the customer’s environment for testing, as opposed to the traditional approach where the environment supplied cannot
simulate real-life scenarios.
3. Ideal for Mobile apps and mCommerce: Considering the upsurge of mobile apps and devices, the cloud provides an ideal testing solution for various device types, configurations, screen sizes, and other variables. Especially new solutions like Firebase Test Lab for Android or AWS Device Farm are ideal for Android Cloud Testing or iOS cloud testing for
hundreds of devices.
Device Clouds for Mobile App Testing is a key factor that enables
developers to cover a vast number of scenarios in a short period of time. This has contributed to the growth of mobile, significantly.
4. Performance Testing: You can rigorously test the app’s performance with the cloud because it gives you a scale on demand. There is no need to invest in a large hardware or hosting for your occasional performance testing needs.
5. DevOps and Agile friendly: The flexibility, customizability, and scalability of making it easy for DevOps and Agile teams to test using identical configurations and dev/test environments, easy and rapid deployment, and delivery of apps and services. Cloud testing
is collaborative by design and facilitates all aspects of testing right from the configuration, customer access, or A/B testing.
Continuous Deployment with Cloud
Google has introduced Cloud build to allow businesses to build software quickly across languages. With native docker support, powerful insights package vulnerability scanning, and ability, Cloud Build features are designed to provide speed with flexibility. Cloud Build enables
quick deployment across several environments like VMs, serverless, Kubernetes, or Firebase.
While cloud computing is cost-efficient, reasons like on-demand flexibility, collaboration and reduced time to market have led many businesses to rethink their testing model. What’s more, the efforts and resources saved by moving testing to the cloud can be redeployed for other business activities.
How to Test Cloud Applications?
There are many ways to leverage the potential of cloud computing and testing. Here are A few of the many kinds of testing performed.
Types of Cloud Testing
Functional Testing
Functional testing generally describes what the system does. It is carried out to ensure that the results of activities and tasks meet the desired output. You can perform functional testing either manually or automatically. You can carry out the following types of functional tests:
- System Tests
- Integration Tests
- User Acceptance Tests
System Testing
System testing is conducted on a complete, integrated system to check the system’s compliance with the original requirements. This is checked against something called the Functional Requirement Specification(FRS) and/or System Requirement Specification(SRS).
It is in fact a series of tests conducted on the full system to ensure it fulfills the expected behavior, design, and specifications.
Integration Testing
With the help of Integration, testing is the technique you can test each software module as a group. Essentially, it checks for interoperability issues with different platforms and also from cloud infrastructure to another.
User Acceptance Testing: The purpose of UAT is to verify that the cloud solution meets user needs and requirements. Testing is carried out both on-site and off-site.
But deciding to opt for cloud testing is a strategic move. You need to have proof of concept to build confidence. Carry out pilots with specific testing goals in mind before you take the leap. If you don’t have sufficient testing staff, you can also opt for on-demand testing services.
Do a feasibility study to look at the scenarios where cloud testing will be beneficial to the company. Compare the costs of in-house provisioning, vis-à-vis the cost of using cloud-based testing. It is important to analyze the depth and range of benefits and move forward only if your cloud strategy resolves specific business requirements.
Non-Functional Testing Techniques
They are used to ensure that applications meet various performance requirements. These are often called performance testing techniques.
These tests are carried to check the non-functional requirements, which is the overall quality of the product. Here are a few of the non-functional testing techniques.
1) Business Requirement Testing: Before taking the big leap, organizations should thoroughly check their business requirements. Business requirements are the foundation for cloud computing solutions and getting them in order is the first step.
2) Availability Testing: This test is to make sure that cloud services are available round the clock. If there is any downtime, it might adversely impact the business.
3) Security Testing: This is one of the most important tests, as your data may contain user-sensitive or business-critical data. Check for authorized access and equipping cloud instances with adequate controls and the ability to mitigate data breach threats.
4) Performance Testing: This should be done to verify the response time under various loads. One of the crucial factors to check performance is network latency. Load and stress testing are necessary to ensure that apps perform as required regardless of the increase or the decrease in load and stress.
5) Scalability Testing: Test to ensure that the solution offers scale on demand. Scalability and performance testing help to gauge the system’s performance and capacity accurately.
6) Latency Testing: This measures the latency or delay between the action and response for any app once it is deployed on the cloud.
7) Multi-tenancy Testing: Multi-tenancy refers to the practice where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serving multiple tenants across groups of users that share
common access. It is necessary to perform sufficient checks for security and access control of data when multiple users share rights.
8) Disaster Recovery Testing: For business continuity purposes, cloud availability needs to be assured at all times. This requires a backup for network outages, load breakdown system failure, and other unpredictable failures.
How Cloud Testing enables Continuous Delivery
In the DevOps era, testing is crucial to the delivery pipeline. It is the age of the connected consumer that has led to faster, on-demand testing. For this dynamic delivery model, availability, flexibility, security, and cost-effectiveness are very important.
The cloud has become an important means to make this happen. Digital cloud storage is the most affordable alternative for data storage, security, scalability to the complex on-site systems.
The rapid pace of technological advancement has led to the proliferation of devices, platforms, OS, and systems. it is virtually impossible to carry out the functional, performance, and visual testing of web and mobile apps on many different platforms and scale them
effectively.
But cloud-based automated testing has made it possible to test on several platforms and mobile devices using the cloud, anytime and anywhere. This allows Agile teams to develop, tweak, and integrate small chunks of software as they go, making continuous integration a reality. Cloud testing is also ideal in this age of everyday releases, for testing in real-time on
the virtual setup with accurate load and performance testing, in addition to visual validation.
For instance, an online casino software company that uses cloud-based testing for their app and version release can deliver much faster for a combination of OS and devices easily.
To Conclude
Cloud Testing provides comprehensive solutions and has quite a transformative impact on testing and an organization’s competitiveness. The biggest advantage with cloud-based testing tools is the shorter provisioning times and availability on demand.
