Cloud-based testing has become quite integral these days. Most businesses have already done the shift towards cloud-based testing. The main reason is – it is faster, inexpensive, flexible, and requires no maintenance.
The best part is that we do not own it, can easily lease it from a service provider, can easily scale up and scale down according to requirements and only have to pay for the amount of time we use the cloud resources.
The traditional testing that was done on the software installed on local servers is now slowly fading away. With cloud-based testing, everything resides on the cloud and therefore the testing approach also changes where all testing related activities are done on the cloud and IT is delivered as a service. However, the primary goal of traditional testing and cloud-based testing remains the same i.e., to deliver high-quality and efficient software.
Cloud-based testing comprises cloud-based test automation as well. To facilitate cloud-based test automation, there are different types of tools. Here is an article that will help you ascertain if you need to implement cloud-based test automation in your organization: 6 signs you need to invest in a cloud-based test automation tool
How is cloud-based testing different from traditional testing
Let’s see the differences between cloud-based testing and traditional testing in detail:
Traditional testingCloud-based testing
Configuration may take many days.No configuration required, just choose the environment and start testing.
Set-up is manual and susceptible to human errors.Set-up is automatic and free from manual errors.
Expensive as real devices are purchased.Inexpensive as real devices are not purchased.
Executed on the local servers of the organisation.Executed on third-party servers of the service providers.
Data is present on the local server and hence cannot be accessed from everywhere.Data is present on the cloud hence can be accessed from any location.
Let us explore the advantages and disadvantages of cloud-based and traditional testing.
Cloud-based testing advantages
- The environment is dynamic and scalable.
- Provides better testing speed, since it can run 24*7.
- Services provided by a cloud-based vendor are inexpensive.
- It provides better and simple disaster recovery because the process is automated.
- Accessible from any location hence supports mobility.
Cloud-based testing disadvantages
- Bandwidth can be an issue because the cloud servers are shared resources.
- May pose security issues, since the data is handed over to a third party during testing.
- Requires very good internet connectivity.
- Limited control and dependency on the service provider.
Traditional testing advantages
- Secure since it is executed on local servers.
- No internet connectivity is required for testing since it is executed locally.
- Provides full control and there is no dependency on third-party service providers.
Traditional testing disadvantages
- Expensive because real devices are purchased.
- Scalability is an issue since it needs to be addressed manually.
- Can not be executed from global locations.
- Configuration of the real devices and environment is time-consuming.
When to move to cloud testing
Every project/ software/organization is different and have different requirements. We need to answer the below questions when we think about adopting cloud testing in a project.
1. Is there a possibility that moving testing to the cloud may lead to a change in the test strategy or foundation of testing? The Foundation of testing is always going to remain the same – the testing skills, curiosity, enthusiasm are a few of them.
2. Do we need to learn new skills? Definitely, cloud testing will involve some new technology and the testers will need to learn them.
3. How is it going to affect the current testing tasks? Will it be beneficial or pose problems?
4. What are the different testing types that will be needed to execute?
5. What are the tools that will be required to perform cloud testing?
6. What risks should be considered?
How to start with cloud-based testing
When we decide to start cloud-based testing in a project then we need to decide how we are going to manage the whole process of cloud-based testing. What are the areas which will be affected and need proper planning and management during this process? Few major points to think about will be:
1. Process: Chalking out the strategy to make a move to cloud-based testing.
2. Activities: Evaluation of the testing activities that will need to move to the cloud. Examples are Agile testing, TDD, automation testing, regression testing, etc. Together with the evaluation of the testing activities, we need to estimate the cost involved as well.
3. Technology: We need to decide what technologies we will be using for cloud testing. Examples are DevOps, AWS, Big Data, Testing as Service, testing environments.
4. People: What people in the team will need to quickly adapt to cloud testing by learning new technologies. Testers need to perform testing on many levels – unit, integration, UI, services, security, governance. It becomes necessary to provide them with proper training and knowledge to be a perfect fit for starting cloud testing.
What Roles and responsibilities are required for the success of cloud-based testing?
With the advent of cloud testing, we will require below roles and responsibilities in the team. However, they may differ from organization to organization but these are the standard ones:
- Developers: To perform unit and integration testing, apart from development.
- Test Analyst: To implement the cloud testing strategy in the project
- Technical test analyst: To perform the actual manual/automated testing of the applications
- Customer: To perform acceptance testing
- IT department: To monitor, analyze the cloud and they will act as a point-of-contact to the cloud provider
- Cloud provider: To provide the service level agreements, services testing
Testsigma as a cloud-based test automation tool
To ease the process of using and setting up cloud-based testing, we should use tools that mitigate the complexities involved. The inconvenience of setting up a test lab all by ourselves is real and should be avoided if possible.
By using cloud-based testing tools like Testsigma, which provide an easy use cloud-based test automation tool that also integrates with different device labs on the cloud, we can save ourselves from exorbitant prices and set-up time.
Testsigma is an AI-driven, cloud-based testing tool that is built for DevOps and Agile teams. It is a unified platform for running the below types of testing parallelly on browsers and mobile devices, without any installation or set-up.
- Continuous testing
- Web application testing
- Mobile app testing
- Regression testing
- Cross-browser testing
- Data-driven testing
- Functional testing
- Regression Testing
Testsigma provides the below benefits during cloud-based testing:
- Pay according to the environment and time period of usage.
- All environments/ resources are available 24*7.
- Can be accessed from anywhere in the World, the team can be present in different geographical locations.
- Provides scalability since the environments are on the cloud and there is no limit to them.
- Parallel testing can be done 24*7, which results in faster delivery.
Try Testsigma for completely cloud-based automated testing of your application, the easy way
Conclusion
Cloud-based testing solves the problem of remote testing very conveniently since we are relying on cloud computing here. This type of testing accelerates the testing process immensely, which is the need of the hour.
One example of a cloud-based testing tool is Testsigma which is a SaaS(Software as Service) based unified platform. Where the users can directly write the test cases using plain English.
