Testing in the Cloud and of the Cloud.

The Cloud computing paradigm offers many opportunities for testers to add great value to their testing at little, or no, additional costs. This is because the Cloud’s scalability is precisely the property that testers have been needing for at least 10 year.

Traditionally, testers have needed additional IT support services to create a range of suitable test environments that testers can work in. Often these environments are dedicated to a single development project and often incur considerable capital ans support costs, in addition to the project test resources.

Today, the Cloud enables testers to grow and shrink their test infrastructure needs on a constantly changing basis, dependant on the testing needs of the project. Adding an other browser to the compatibility matrix? No problem! Just add another test system to the list and kick of all the tests at the same time. This eliminates one of the most frustrating tradeoff testers have to deal with. Do you one only one platform to do all the testing on and have an increasingly lengthing test cycle as more tests are added to the plan? Or, do buy more test kit so that the tests can be run in parallel but now you have yet again increased capital costs and reduced total utilisation by having even more systems sitting idle when they are not needed?

This is where the Cloud excels. You only have to pay for what you use. If you want a peak of 20 test platforms for 2 hours each, that is what you get. In a traditional environment you would have to have 20 platforms available 24/7 just to meet the capacity needs to get the testing done in 2 hour. Alternatively, you have one test platform running all the tests and it takes 40 hours to complete 1 cycle of testing. Now testing is the bottleneck in your SDLC.

Developing for the Cloud is not only a way to control costs for production systems, it also solved some very real dilemmas that testers have to face every day.

While Cloud deployment has many benefits, it should also be kept in mind that Cloud architecture is still developing and performance characteristics of Cloud applications cannot be guaranteed to scale limitlessly. Additionally, the applications rely on the security provided by your Cloud infrastructure supplier.

In conclusion, Cloud computing offers many interesting solutions for testers, but it also requires them to address the unique attributes of Cloud platforms and plan to test the performance and security of their Cloud platform.

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Tags: cloud testing functional automation performance security

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