As
Cloud based applications are going mainstream, the quality assurance and the
testing teams need to revise and innovate their testing skills and processes in
order to ensure a timely and effective application deployment and return on
investment. The Cloud technology has already caused disruptive effects on the
technical aspect of the business landscape. The most critical change exhibited
by the Cloud is the amount of power and flexibility given to the designers, content creators and the end
users. Here, the traditional role of the developers, testers and end users have
pushed their limits and are eventually becoming interchangeable in many
respects. The multi-tenant architecture helps experience the full potential of the Cloud. Here, each
client shares computing resources provided by the service provider, but with
separate data and code bases. The following can be considered as the main steps
in the Life Cycle of Cloud Application Testing
- Requirement
Specifications:
Specifications, workflow description and security grid reference created by the
business analyst
- Development: Significant Testing is done
in this phase before the actual testing cycle starts. Testing performed – Field
validations, Formula Validations, Workflow validation, Security validation and
web service validation
- Testing: System testing requires
lesser time than usual. Testing performed: Integration Testing, Functional
testing, Regression Testing and user acceptance testing.
The Cloud Testing approach: An effective cloud
testing approach can be planned through the following steps:
- Verification of Field Properties
- Verification of formulas associated with fields
- Verification of triggers and workflows
- Verification of data security
- Verification of web services
Many
companies are willing to be more adventurous regarding Cloud application testing. Factors which account
for such an approach are:
- Almost half the
technology infrastructure for testing remains underutilized, consuming capital,
power and space. Testing is a period activity and requires new environments to
be set up for each project.
- Cloud Software Testing
can be seen as safe, as it does not involve sensitive corporate data and has
minimal impact on the day to day business activities of an organization.
- Applications are becoming
more and more dynamic, complex, distributed and component based, creating
multiple challenges for the testing
team.
- Cost reduction is one of
the main factors that is encouraging the companies to move to the Cloud. Cloud
Software Testing leverages the Cloud computing infrastructure, which reduces
the unit cost of computing and increases effectiveness in testing.
Challenges of Cloud Testing
- Security is one of the
primary concerns in Cloud testing. User privacy protection, security standards
on the Cloud, security of applications currently running in the Cloud and the
security testing techniques are some of the main issues of Cloud testing.
- The performance of a
shared application is another big challenge. As the application is shared
across many users it could lead to delays.
- Certain configurations
may not be supported by the Cloud service provider. This makes it difficult to
emulate the customer environment settings.
- Integration testing is
another challenge in the testing process on the Cloud. Interactions between the
network, database and servers pose testing challenges under potential risks
such as crashes, network breakdown, etc.
Conclusion
Cloud
Testing helps to resolve the challenges associated with traditional testing. It
eliminates up-front investments in hardware infrastructure, their management
and maintenance, software licensing and support costs. Cloud Testing is
continually evolving with new concepts, challenges and opportunities. It is
more cost effective with little impact on an organization's regular business activities.
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