How can Cloud Testing enable your Digital Testing process?

The growing complexity and scope of software applications have necessitated the use of cloud-based resources. This helps to bring down the cost of investment and offers businesses a host of benefits. The cloud provides tremendous scope for enterprises to enable digital transformation and gain viability. This is important, for digital transformation does not limit itself to developing applications alone but enhances the capacity of people, processes and technologies.

Besides enabling the development of applications and storage of data, the cloud has opened new avenues for digital testing as well. Traditionally, testing has not been given its due importance by business stakeholders. This is due to the infrequent usage of an otherwise costly in-house test infrastructure. So, when the complexity of applications has grown significantly high owing to the presence of myriad digital touchpoints, maintaining an in-house test infrastructure to mimic the real time environment has become highly capital intensive.

This is where the cloud-based resources or cloud testing services have become important. In fact, the cloud has helped enterprises to eliminate the need for high capital investments and has offered the benefits of virtualization. For example, testing the usability and functionality of a complex software application by using scores of users spread across geographies might not be possible in an actual test setup. However, the same can be achieved quickly in a cloud environment by enabling test virtualization. Thus, cloud testing services have helped enterprises meet their operational and financial objectives.

Let us delve into the reasons as to how digital testing on the cloud can be beneficial.

The advantages of cloud-based testing

Lower Capital Expenditure: Executing digital assurance and testing on the cloud can help in lowering costs by doing away with capital expenditure. Moreover, the cloud can create sophisticated test environments that mimic the real ones. In addition to cost benefits, cloud-based testing offers on-demand flexibility and ensures better collaboration among departments, improved efficiency and a reduced time-to-market. Moreover, since testing happens to be a periodic activity, in-house test environments often remain underutilized. So, moving digital testing services to the cloud can be a safe and economical bet for enterprises due to the latter’s minimal impact on business activities.

Importantly, small and medium enterprises with low capital inflows can leverage the cloud for digital software testing. This way, SMEs can save money on creating and maintaining costly test infrastructure and in obtaining tool licenses. Also, for private cloud, the infrastructure can be decommissioned once the testing activity gets over thereby saving additional cost on maintenance.

Scalability: Software applications have become increasingly complex and distributed, bringing new challenges for the digital assurance experts. The new age web or mobile applications should be validated across a multitude of operating systems, frameworks, browsers, devices, and hardware systems.

Also, a large number of users should test the applications in real-time to validate the latter’s performance as per the business specifications.

However, creating a real time test environment mirroring the complexities and multiplicities can be capital intensive and time consuming. On the other hand, provisioning on-demand cloud-based resources for testing can be time and cost saving besides enhancing the quality of applications. The cloud-based test platforms (public, private or hybrid) can help in scaling up the number of virtual test users from hundreds to millions. This helps to test an application’s threshold for breaking or the point at which it can function unpredictably. Thus, enterprises can prepare themselves better to meet the peak demand and remain competitive.

Supports Continuous Integration and Delivery Outcomes: Since achieving customer delight has become the ultimate differentiator for enterprises to become successful, they aim to achieve the same with every new application. Also, by embracing the Agile-DevOps model of development and testing, enterprises look to achieve outcomes such as Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) in real time. Cloud testing offers a seamless and collaborative platform for testers to leverage Agile-DevOps model. Also, continuous integration is achieved by deploying new modules or patches faster and within the scheduled turnaround time. By providing a robust virtual test environment, the cloud helps test experts to validate applications on metrics such as performance, usability, scalability, functionality, and security.

Conclusion

Setting up a capital intensive in-house testing infrastructure would mean following its protocols and ensuring the test requirements fit into the demands. However, a cloud-based digital QA and testing infrastructure can be used as per your testing needs. It provides the opportunity to conduct multiple tests at a given point in time leading to higher quality standards.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Software Testing Services Company to be appraised at Cmmi-Svc v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also Iso 9001:2015 & Iso 27001:2013 certified.