Cloud Testing – The Future of Software Testing

As Cloud based applications are going mainstream, the quality assurance and the testing teams need to revise and innovate their testing skills and processes in order to ensure a timely and effective application deployment and return on investment. The Cloud technology has already caused disruptive effects on the technical aspect of the business landscape. The most critical change exhibited by the Cloud is the amount of power and flexibility given to the designers, content creators and the end users. Here, the traditional role of the developers, testers and end users have pushed their limits and are eventually becoming interchangeable in many respects. The multi-tenant architecture helps experience the full potential of the Cloud. Here, each client shares computing resources provided by the service provider, but with separate data and code bases. The following can be considered as the main steps in the Life Cycle of Cloud Application Testing

• Requirement Specifications: Specifications, workflow description and security grid reference created by the business analyst

-Development: Significant Testing is done in this phase before the actual testing cycle starts. Testing performed – Field validations, Formula Validations, Workflow validation, Security validation and web service validation

-Testing: System testing requires lesser time than usual. Testing performed: Integration Testing, Functional testing, Regression Testing and user acceptance testing.

The Cloud Testing approach:

An effective cloud testing approach can be planned through the following steps:

1. Verification of Field Properties
2. Verification of formulas associated with fields
3. Verification of triggers and workflows
4. Verification of data security
5. Verification of web services

Many companies are willing to be more adventurous regarding cloud application testing. Factors which account for such an approach are:

-Almost half the technology infrastructure for testing remains underutilized, consuming capital, power and space. Testing is a period activity and requires new environments to be set up for each project.

-Cloud Software Testing can be seen as safe, as it does not involve sensitive corporate data and has minimal impact on the day to day business activities of an organization.

-Applications are becoming more and more dynamic, complex, distributed and component based, creating multiple challenges for the testing team.

-Cost reduction is one of the main factors that is encouraging the companies to move to the Cloud. Cloud Software Testing leverages the Cloud computing infrastructure, which reduces the unit cost of computing and increases effectiveness in testing.

Challenges of Cloud Testing

-Security is one of the primary concerns in Cloud testing. User privacy protection, security standards on the Cloud, security of applications currently running in the Cloud and the security testing techniques are some of the main issues of Cloud testing.

-The performance of a shared application is another big challenge. As the application is shared across many users it could lead to delays.

-Certain configurations may not be supported by the Cloud service provider. This makes it difficult to emulate the customer environment settings.

-Integration testing is another challenge in the testing process on the Cloud. Interactions between the network, database and servers pose testing challenges under potential risks such as crashes, network breakdown, etc.

Conclusion

Cloud Testing helps to resolve the challenges associated with traditional testing. It eliminates up-front investments in hardware infrastructure, their management and maintenance, software licensing and support costs. Cloud Testing is continually evolving with new concepts, challenges and opportunities. It is more cost effective with little impact on an organization's regular business activities.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.