What is Cloud Testing? What is its Role in Test Automation?
Does Cloud testing have a role to play in Test Automation?
You’re well aware that applications can be developed in-house and deployed on the cloud, developed and deployed on the cloud itself, or even part of hybrid/shared deployment models. You’re also abreast of the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS models and how they’re accreted together to form cloud computing.
After all, the manifold benefits of the cloud, including multi-tenancy, on-demand services, and scalability, among others, have been extensively touted and discussed in the past few years. But how does the role of cloud testing fair in this picture? What is it? When is it applicable? Does the testing methodology change at all? or Do you need to treat cloud-based applications in the same way that you usually treat on-premises ones? Finally, what role does it play in bringing test automation to the spotlight?
This article aims to answer these questions.
What is Cloud Testing?
It is the umbrella term used to describe testing activities performed by leveraging cloud computing. The whole idea revolves around allocating shared resources, namely computing, storage, and network bandwidth, to execute tests. That way, you’re not constrained by the number of physical machines you need to fulfill your testing requirements.
S. Nachiyappan and S. Justus, assistant professors at VIT University, brand cloud testing as a means to “simulate real-world traffic by using existing cloud computing technologies.” This effectively translates into a test suite executed from the cloud or leveraging the tools.
What Are the Benefits of Cloud Testing?
If projections by Emergen Research are to be credited, the market will cross $21.67 billion by the year 2028. But, to tell you the truth, that comes as little surprise because this type of testing offers a host of benefits, such as:
Resource-Oriented Paradigm
Testing on Cloud provides continued access to vast resources and optimal usage. However, this is the opposite of traditional testing, which requires a certain number of resources to run a test suite.
Test Automation for Diverse Teams
Automation is one of the core pillars for successful cloud testing. And, when you automate your test suites, you effectively enable test engineers, developers, and even business analysts to do more in less time – even when they’re working across different time zones and operating virtually.
Enhanced Test Coverage
By leveraging the cloud, you ensure that you can cover more testable space and also increase your test coverage. This also paves the way for higher test design efficacy and ensures that your applications are more robust and reliable.
Testing-as-a-Service
Considering the flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency that the cloud gives you, test automation becomes a more viable proposition. This, in turn, opens doors for businesses seeking to test their applications at a fraction of the cost and time.
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Is Cloud Testing Different from Traditional Software Testing?
The differences between the both boil down to how and where you execute your test suite. From a high-level standpoint, the underlying concepts and testing principles don’t change a bit.
For instance, the software testing lifecycle is no different in a cloud environment than in an on-premises one. Similarly, the fundamentals of test planning and test cases are still relevant. What changes is how you go about testing. For cloud testing, you use the cloud as your base — and, in doing so, this typically means that you augment your traditional software testing framework by incorporating cloud testing tools and approaches.
More profoundly, you make the most of test automation during the execution phase of the software testing lifecycle. This ensures that you can deliver more test coverage, pinpoint the errors, and enhance test design efficacy.
What Are the Types of Cloud Testing?
So far we’ve understood the benefits and why it has become so popular nowadays. The types of testing specific to this process are:
Scalability Testing
The on-the-go and as-you-go nature of the cloud allow you to apply a scalable approach to your testing. Scalability testing is a way to test improvements that take advantage of cloud resources’ elastic provisioning and scaling.
Browser Performance Testing
The seamless operationality across the browsers is a core feature. And in turn, this makes it feasible to test the performance of web-based applications to keep up with the changing landscape of user behaviors. Browser performance testing ensures that all browsers, operating systems, and devices display web applications in the same way.
Multi-tenancy Testing
Multi-tenancy testing detects and avoids the existence of slack, expediting seamless use of applications by multiple users simultaneously. This is where you can test your app’s ability to scale with multiple users simultaneously.
What Is the Role of Cloud Testing in Test Automation?
In all honesty, cloud automation testing is for businesses that want to shave their testing costs, make test execution faster, and improve test coverage. By leveraging the cloud — along with the resources it provides — you can create a scalable environment for executing your test suites at an optimum level of quality and efficiency.
For teams that can sustain themselves with on-premises testing, such an approach may seem alien. Cloud-based test automation is a good choice for teams looking to accomplish tasks in half the time and resources.
Parallelization and Multi-Tenancy
This is probably the most significant benefit on this list. With the cloud in your testing arsenal, you’re able to concurrently run a single test case across an unlimited number of resources. Also, you can run different test environments on different resources to test the same test case.
Space for Creative Thinking
With the cloud, you can think outside the box without designing and running separate test cases redundantly. This is the perfect way to implement test-driven development. Test-driven development can dramatically improve the design, robustness, and quality of your application.
Faster Execution
As elucidated in the previous sections, you have access to a pool of resources that you can use for running test scenarios with the cloud at your disposal. In addition, making the test execution faster, improves the overall turnaround time of your automated tests, and reduces costs.
Interested in learning more about cloud-based test automation? Reach out to us today, and we’ll be happy to assist you.
Geosley Andrades
Director, Product Evangelist at ACCELQ.
Geosley is a Test Automation Evangelist and Community builder at ACCELQ. Being passionate about continuous learning, Geosley helps ACCELQ with innovative solutions to transform test automation to be simpler, more reliable, and sustainable for the real world.
