Cloud Testing: GeNext

Software QA and Testing has reached new heights with the advancement of technology. One such paradigm change is the advent of Cloud Testing which ensures an economical, scalable and quick solution to the testing community. In order to know how Cloud Testing is going to be the GeNext, one has to understand the purpose of Cloud Testing.
Necessity is the mother of all inventions! The development of new software programs and web applications of higher variety and complexity has become a norm. As a result, ensuring quality for the unmanned brains has become a challenging task. An ideal test engineer will ensure quality with a high rate of accuracy. Nonetheless, an application's functionality cannot be judged just by looking at how the application behaves with a single user, and this point of conce
has always proved to be a thorn in the flesh for the manual test engineers in ensuring quality. Therefore, to see how the application behaves in an environment where it might not even be expected to work in, a virtual environment becomes necessary. Virtually setting up machines of different configurations and make them use the application so as to check its behavior is done using Cloud Computing.

Organizations invest thousands of dollars in developing software applications and environments that are their core revenue generators. Load-testing is crucial for ensuring that a software version is ready for production, thus, reducing the risks of unpleasant surprises under load. Cloud Testing generally deals in testing the load on the application with fewer compromises. Compromises include:

1. System being tested under average load with an odd myth that the system crashes when subjected to heavy load
2. Enterprise bandwidth – Bottle Neck
3. Risk of sustaining promised performance

With cloud-testing, compromises are no longer necessary. With cloud, we can have unlimited resources at our disposal, paying only for what we consume, only if we consume it. In the past, for a medium sized organization, load-testing solution would cost tens of thousands of dollars, Services such as SaaS, Utility computing, MSP (Managed Services) have all been providing viable solutions to this challenge. It now takes only a few hours to launch a test of 30,000 concurrent users with complex database transactions and user authentication. The cost of such a setup is considerably lower as compared to what it was some years ago.

So from QA testing point of view, all you need is a cloud-deployable load generation client, a couple of cloud computing environments, and a way to control those distributed clients in such a manner so as to generate the scale necessary to push your application and infrastructure to their limits.

With the advent of lightning fast applications, Cloud Testing, in the near future, will be a major path in ensuring performance for software applications and it is going to monopolize itself in the coming decade.