Today, IT entities and companies all over the world are adopting cloud services or solutions to minimize the entire cost related to IT infrastructure.
According to Statista, the worldwide public cloud computing market will reach an estimated 482 billion USD in the coming years. Whether enterprise software or any product made to land the masses, it is extremely necessary to foster cloud testing services to drive productive cloud solutions.
However, implementing a cloud solution is one thing, while yielding the desired productivity from the solution is another. This is where testers can witness some drawbacks while leveraging cloud-based software testing. In the article, we will highlight the concept of cloud testing services while sharing different ways cloud testing shares advantages and drawbacks.
Let’s begin!
Understanding Cloud-based Software Testing
Cloud testing, also termed cloud-based testing, implies testing an application in the cloud to validate its performance, security, scalability, interoperability, multitenancy, etc.; when a company leverages cloud computing infrastructure, it is bound to be benefitted from the reduction of the unit cost of computing.
In other words, the process of leveraging a third-party service provider’s cloud computing resources for software application testing is known as testing on the cloud, often referred to as cloud testing.
The Pros Of Cloud-based Software Testing
Cloud testing explicitly increases testing efficiency while having several compelling benefits such as flexibility, high scalability, testing difficult test environments involving multiple mobile OS, browsers, various platforms, and more. Nevertheless, it often turns out to be a complicated task to find the perfect cloud engineers. Therefore, you must find a reliable platform to hire cloud engineers to ensure they perform the tasks with desired proficiency.
1. Help in Improving Security
Cloud-based security testing is crucial to improving the application’s security in the cloud. Enhanced security will ultimately improve the quality. It identifies security bottlenecks and helps remove security vulnerabilities that cyber-attackers/hackers could otherwise exploit. This way, there are lesser chances of loss in businesses.
2. Enhances Overall Quality-related Performance
Performance testing in cloud computing ensures no performance-related loopholes in the software. Several features, like the auto-scaling feature, work appropriately so that servers or virtual machines can automatically manage the load-handling capacity when traffic utilization levels fluctuate or increase/decrease accordingly.
3. Cloud Testing Improves Quality by Checking Compliance
By leveraging cloud testing, testers also ensure that the application under test meets all the laws and regulatory compliance, like data protection laws, data sovereignty laws, data localization laws, and access to information laws, to name a few. These are all necessary for an app to operate in the cloud.
4. Enables Seamless App Migration
Cloud testing helps companies ensure the effective migration of applications stored on the cloud. This is done by removing data migration issues related to the incompleteness of migrated data, database errors, and other technical-related glitches.
5. Proper Integration with Cloud Testing
Cloud testing helps remove all sorts of integration issues and ensures that the application is compatible with various platforms. It also validates that the app or service properly integrates with servers and works well in the cloud.
6. Allows Testing Across Various Types of Clouds
Cloud testing allows testing across various clouds, such as public, private, hybrid, community, or combinations.
Understanding The Cons Of Cloud Testing
Cloud is not without its drawbacks. Cloud testing challenges can stall the development cycle if not approached with a collaborative strategy. Addressing the challenges in cloud testing before implementation can strengthen your QA practices, increase your ROI, and speed up your time to market. A comprehensive testing strategy considers all counterpoints of cloud testing before adopting it as a part of a QA approach.
1. Bandwidth Issues
As many other organizations share the cloud’s resources, demand for bandwidth always fluctuates. When a reliable internet connection can’t be kept up, or there isn’t enough bandwidth to support testing, QA teams face difficulties with cloud testing. Increase the efficiency of your cloud-based testing tool by putting in place a backup plan that can meet your bandwidth requirements in the event of a connectivity issue or outage.
2. Redundant tests
Since cloud servers are not regularly backed up, no redundant test plans are kept track of. As a result, you can be charged for repeat testing of your website, application, or code. In order to overcome these difficulties with cloud performance testing, invest in a backup plan in case current technology fails.
3. Loss of Security and Autonomy
If you use a cloud-based testing application, you give your data and personal information to a third party. Due to the increased vulnerability of your data, cloud testing may have difficulties. Moreover, your IT team cannot fix problems that come up during testing internally. Because of this, it’s crucial to pick a cloud-based testing provider that provides round-the-clock customer assistance and a ticket escalation system.
4. Feature Coverage
Does your application provide a wide range of features? Do you frequently introduce new features? You might not always be able to test every new feature you release using your cloud testing services, which would lead to insufficient test coverage. In order to get rid of this challenge, Your QA team can select a more robust cloud testing provider and collaborate with outside QA testing professionals to address these issues, ensuring that your product retains quality at the point of sale.
Verify that you comprehend all testing criteria necessary for successfully testing your software application before moving your testing procedures to the cloud. By doing so, you may pick the best cloud-based mobile testing tools for your project and create a solid testing strategy that handles any potential difficulties in cloud application testing with doable fixes and established procedures.
This entails using cloud resources to test cloud resources, such as cloud-native software as a service (SaaS) products or architecture, or to use cloud resources as part of a quality assurance (QA) plan.
Types of cloud testing
- Functional evaluation: This includes unit testing, user acceptance testing, integration testing, smoke testing, sanity testing, white box testing, and black box testing.
- System testing: This testing checks application features’ functionality by running tests on them.
- Interoperability testing: This ensures that the application’s performance is not affected by changes made to its infrastructure.
- Stress testing: This type of testing identifies an application’s capacity to continue to be stable and effective even under heavy workloads.
- Load Testing: This testing evaluates how the program reacts to loads of simulated user traffic.
- Latency testing: This type of testing examines the delay between a user’s actions and the application’s answers.
- Performance testing: As the name suggests, this tests an application’s performance under specific workloads and is used to identify thresholds, bottlenecks, and other performance restrictions.
- Security testing: This testing checks for security flaws in the application’s data and code.
- Disaster recovery testing: It ensures that data loss and other irreparable harm won’t result from cloud downtime and other contingency scenarios.
- Browser performance testing: This testing examines how well an application performs in various web browsers.
- Compatibility testing: This testing evaluates the performance of applications on various operating systems (OSes).
Wrapping Up!
Cloud-based software testing is essential, but understanding its criteria is even more essential. As we know, the cloud comes with challenges and some drawbacks, but if leveraged carefully, it can help enterprises go a long way on their digital journeys.
All in all, it is crucial to be careful while choosing a cloud-based software testing solution, in order to leverage efficient testing outcomes and sustainable deliveries.