What are the Benefits of Adopting the TaaS Model for Testing?

Author: James Danel

The intense pace of software development and deployment to meet the needs of both businesses and users has necessitated the validation of such software in the shortest possible time. And to drive the effectiveness of software quality assurance through detailed analytics and rapid execution, the software testing as a service (TaaS) model has become very useful. TaaS is an outsourcing model where all testing activities for an organization are executed by a service provider instead of the in-house team. The TaaS based quality assurance services help business enterprises to achieve continuous automated testing along the lines of Agile-DevOps. The service provider helps the testing processes of an organization to become streamlined, automated, and integrated into the SDLC. Software testing as a service can be leveraged by IT companies, especially start-ups, that lack the financial and human resources and technology to achieve a rapid pace of continuous testing.

Testing as a service offers a single platform to execute end-to-end enterprise application testing. It covers the whole range of non-functional and functional test requirements as mentioned below:

Full test cycle

  • Designing test cases and automation
  • Executing various test types; smoke testing, regression testing, integration testing, user acceptance testing, pre-production testing, and production deployment testing, among others
  • Reporting and analysis of test results for better decision making

Central test repository

  • A single repository housing all test assets, namely, test cases, plans, data, workflows, and results
  • Stakeholders can access the automation workflows and test cases to draw insights
  • The utility of the repository increases with the growth of the content library

Test automation design

  • Browser-based design to enable automation playback and recording
  • TaaS recorder records/captures user activities when they use the software system
  • Simple workflow automation syntax to learn

Test execution

  • On-demand execution of unattended scheduled test cases
  • Both automated and manual test execution
  • Cloud-based test execution

What are the benefits of TaaS software validation testing?

Cost reduction: The company outsourcing the testing job does not have to pay any licensing fees nor have to install (and maintain) the infrastructure/technology or employ human resources.

Pay as per requirement: Companies only pay for the testing activities they need. There are no overhead costs.

Less documentation: As most of the documentation related to testing is done by an outsourced company or vendor, the in-house IT staff have to deal with less documentation.

24 x 7 availability: Most TaaS providers operate 24 x 7 and companies separated by geography and time zones can benefit from this arrangement.

High flexibility: Companies outsourcing their software product testing requirements can change their service plans according to the emerging business requirements.

Less biased testers: The in-house testers may tend to gloss over certain errors made by the developers. This is due to the fact that most testers operate as an adjunct to the development team and are wary of highlighting errors. However, testers from a third-party TaaS provider need not be overawed by such considerations.

Data integrity: Given the criticality of the job, the vendor conducts tests in closed environments by sanitizing the test data.

Short turnaround: Test results are obtained based on the allocated resources and workload. With the TaaS model, multiple tests can be executed in parallel as per the requirements of the DevOps pipeline.

Subscription model: Instead of buying technology, which may or may not meet the requirements of a scalable workload, organizations can utilize technology resources on a demand and subscription basis.

Community driven: The vendor and the user community add new test cases, thereby expanding the test library with configurable parameters. This improves the utility of the TaaS platform as the test cases can be customized for several different user scenarios.

How is TaaS operated?

TaaS, in general, comprises various types of specific procedures. However, they operate in the following ways:

  • A user scenario and test environment are created to conduct the test.
  • A test case is designed to get the company’s response to the scenario.
  • The test is conducted within a secured test environment created by the vendor.
  • The vendor monitors the test performance and evaluates the capability of the company to meet the objectives as laid out in the test design.
  • Both vendors and companies collaborate to improve the quality of the product being tested.

Conclusion

As the complexity of enterprise software applications grows, the need to validate their features and functionalities through rigorous software product testing has become critical. TaaS offers a go-to model for such companies to derive a host of benefits, deliver superior user experiences, and remain competitive.