Need for Cloud Testing – Issues and Challenges
Traditional testing has limitations like latency, performance, concurrency, and planning issues and is way too expensive. Cloud testing is a big game changer and surpasses the challenges faced by traditional testing. It can be used to provide a flexible, scalable, and affordable testing environment at all times or on demand.
Cloud testing typically involves monitoring and reporting on real-world user traffic conditions as well as load balance and stress testing for a range of simulated usage conditions. The availability of virtual machines eases the process of setting up, using, reusing, and running test setups. Complex test setups are available as stacked templates, making it easy to integrate complex automation into various processes to build complex cloud testing systems.
Cloud testing is a great fit for an agile environment. It can leverage the whole life cycle of web or mobile app development, right from the beginning of development until the application is in production. Today, if you need to generate thousands of virtual users to test a specific web application then the number of servers required for that test can be deployed within a couple of minutes. Best of all, you only need to pay those servers for the duration of the test thus making it more economical and viable.
Cloud testing is flexible enough that it can be used for continuous performance testing. Test maker runs tests in multiple cloud testing environments making it possible to manage performance from different geographical locations. Tester gets a real-time testing experience of applications on browsers and OS rather than simulated environments. Cloud testing eliminates the cost of building and maintaining a test lab for load and performance testing. If a specific test environment is required, just use it via the cloud. There is no need to provision expensive and difficult-to-manage quality test labs.
Cloud-based testing poses different operational challenges in the real-world scenario. One of the major challenges would be creating an on-demand test environment. The current cloud technology does not have any supporting solutions that will help cloud engineers build a cost-effective cloud test environment. For scalability and performance testing, the current framework and solutions do not support the features such as dynamic scalability, scalable testing environments, SLA-based requirements, and cost models. Testing security is yet another concern inside clouds as security services become a necessary part of modern cloud technology. Engineers must deal with issues and challenges in security validation and quality assurance for SaaS (Software as a Service) and clouds. Integration testing in the cloud may not be performed due to lack of time or additional integration cost which subsequently affects the performance of the application.
Cloud testing is under constant evolution, continuously bringing in new opportunities and challenges. It reduces the need for hardware and software resources and offers a flexible and efficient alternative to traditional testing. Finally, moving testing to the cloud is seen as a safe bet as it does not include sensitive corporate data and has minimal impact on the organization’s business activities. Migration of self-testing to the cloud would bring about a notion of test support as-a-service.
Have questions? Contact the cloud testing experts at InApp to learn more.
