Nowadays, Software as a service (SaaS) is gaining huge attention in almost every industry. Major business players such as Netflix, HubSpot, Dropbox, Salesforce, Amazon Prime Video realized the real benefits of Saas over on-premises installed applications. Best of all, they don't have to bear hardware or Software acquisition to handle charges and the low-cost solution is easy to handle.
In contrast, SaaS is just like a rental scheme where users pay for what they use, rest responsibility lies on the SaaS application development company. With the rising popularity of SaaS, the list of companies ready to acquire SaaS is also summing up.
Still, one cannot deny it's a hard decision for companies to choose the best SaaS for their business. Many factors affect their decision, like system complexity, application stack, operational aspects, and more. Most important are legacy applications that are made in their own dissenters. They might be in a dilemma of Security, Return on Investment, Platform suitability, Compliances, and Integration.
What is SaaS Testing?
SaaS testing refers to the testing of methods and processes used to build a Software as a service model. SaaS testing is different from on-premise application development testing, as you need to keep an eye on data security concerns, check out business logic, data integration, performance testing, interface, compatibility testing, and more.
As the SaaS model testing needs precise details, it still takes less time than on-premise testing due to the architectural model of Software. With this, under SaaS testing, users don't have to go for server installation, back-end support, multiple platforms compatibility, or msore. But it has a different pattern for testing that we have discussed in this blog. We have also discussed challenges faced by a SaaS application development company. So, read till the end.
SaaS Application Testing
Let's find out various tests carries to check your SaaS application and find out how it is working;
- Business workflow test: A business workflow test is conducted to understand the application's various components and competent features. The test ensures whether a particular model can go with their business or not and how these functions can benefit a company to expand scalability.
- Availability Testing: Availability Testing ensures the app should be active 24*7. If there are downtime or user availability issues arise at a fixed time interval, experienced developers can fix them at the pioneering stage only.
- Stress and Load Testing: Stress and load testing are conducted to judge system performance under peak hours. Like for the taxi business app, businesses get the majority of orders in the morning and evening. The company cannot afford downtime between tense timings. Therefore, stress and load testing help experts to understand capacity.
- Interoperability Testing: This testing is conducted to check whether users from all backgrounds can use the SaaS platform effectively or not. If experts can effectively treat the bugs found at this stage on the spot.
- Performance Testing: Performance testing is essential to smoothen your workflow. The end-to-end testing finds out whether your app is ready to handle the steady load. If not, experts' tools take steady steps to fix an error.
- Security Testing: Security Testing ensures that there is no threat to data privacy or security issues. It is mandatory testing of your customer's important records such as card number, contact number linked to the SaaS model. Like Netflix's customers, it pays a fixed sum of money for a monthly or annual subscription plan which is imperative to handle safely.
- Migration and Integration Testing: Professional integrate APIs in your business app. It helps users to find threats to customers' information or business privacy policies.
Challenges in Testing SaaS Applications
The testing part of SaaS applications is not fun-filled. Professionals cope up with lots of challenges. Here we have listed some of them:
- Performance Testing: The biggest challenge in SaaS application development is to find out if the model fits every user's needs or not. For this, experts need to put additional efforts and concentration into customizing the model.
- Security testing: It is not easy to guarantee a company or customers' data integrity, accessibility, or security. Therefore the application is tested on various behavior patterns, levels to ensure data privacy.
- Data Migration: Migrating data from one application to SaaS is a quite difficult task. It requires lots of time, tools, and coding understanding. A minor mistake can lead to a waste of all efforts or loss of data.
- Management Upgradation: The SaaS application needs to upgrade and validate the changes to meet users and business expectations. But this is not an easy task. Developers have to understand target customers, needs, and preferences. If the company upgrades something, which is hard to understand by customers, it can negatively affect business. In addition, updating live SaaS applications face another challenge: it should not affect existing customers or disturb their regular affairs. So, whether it's about integration issues, compatibility issues, or interface changes, every step brings a new challenge for SaaS developers.
- Integration: Whether a client or SaaS provider, there is always a need for outbound and inbound data integration validation to work on enterprise applications. Like clients provide personal information by signing up. Hence, it's very hard for SaaS providers to look for total data privacy and security concerns.
- Licensing: Each SaaS application requires different licensing based on usage, functionality, users, transaction volume, or data quantity. Therefore, there is a separate set of rules for each licensing procedure.
Conclusion
The use of SaaS applications is rapidly increasing, and the trend continues to evolve in the coming years.
SaaS applications are saving time, effort, and resources to be employed for application development to maintenance. It helps the companies to focus on other significant business decisions that can be observed from the rising revenue of Uber, Slack, Spotify, Airbnb, or others.
But before selecting SaaS applications, make sure your SaaS application development company must test the app from all ends to make it a customized solution for your business needs.
