There’s no question that cloud computing is transforming the software industry, with two-thirds of senior executives reporting that their organization has accelerated its plans for cloud adoption. But despite software testing and quality engineering playing a central role in digital transformation, many organizations have neglected quality teams during cloud adoption.
However, modern software development and quality teams are starting to recognize the need for cloud-based testing to efficiently scale their testing efforts in line with high-velocity development. This is especially important as our research found that 75% of organizations have increased their deployments in the past year.
In this article, we’ll discuss what cloud testing is and why modern software teams are adopting it. We’ll also cover some of the differences between cloud testing solutions and the benefits of SaaS test automation.
What Is Cloud Testing?
Cloud testing (also known as cloud-based testing) is a way to perform functional and non-functional software testing using cloud resources. This approach eliminates the need for quality teams to build and maintain the on-premises infrastructure to execute tests. Instead, organizations can leverage cloud environments to more easily scale their testing efforts while also reducing their total cost of ownership (TCO) for software testing.
Since cloud testing is performed remotely in virtual environments, it’s also possible to test an application using a broader range of browsers, devices, and operating systems. This enables more comprehensive software testing that likely wouldn’t have been possible with local test infrastructure alone.
Who Is Using Cloud Testing?
Modern software development teams are adopting cloud testing because they need to automatically execute hundreds of test cases in parallel without slowing down the development process. This has led many organizations to shift to cloud-based testing platforms that can provide unlimited on-demand computing resources in a more economic way. By executing automated tests quickly, modern quality engineering teams can also avoid bottlenecks when adopting a continuous testing strategy.
When Did Cloud-Based Testing Become Popular?
Cloud testing has become popular with the increasing shift to the cloud by many companies as well as the need to automatically execute tests quickly to keep pace with DevOps teams. Since cloud-based solutions are both scalable and elastic, it’s much easier for quality teams to ramp up their testing efforts without being held back by computing resource limitations. That’s why cloud-based testing has been growing in popularity recently along with continuous testing, shift left testing, and other practices related to quality engineering.
Cloud Testing vs. On-Premises Solutions
Many organizations are adopting cloud testing because it’s more scalable and often costs less than using on-premises infrastructure. The on-demand nature of public cloud services makes it easy to rapidly and automatically provision additional computing resources to execute tests and then only pay for the amount used. This is a more efficient way to implement a comprehensive quality engineering strategy, especially when transitioning to an automated testing strategy.
In contrast, on-premises testing solutions and infrastructure aren’t elastic and have limited scalability. It takes too long to install new servers and other hardware to increase capacity or provision new environments, which can delay testing and slow development velocity. The quality team often needs to turn to other IT and infrastructure teams to upgrade on-premises infrastructure rather than automatically provisioning new resources in the cloud.
Cloud-Hosted vs. Cloud-Native Testing Solutions
While both cloud-hosted and cloud-native testing solutions use cloud resources to execute software testing, they do so differently. A cloud-hosted solution is simply a traditional testing tool that’s been deployed to a cloud environment. A cloud-native testing solution is purpose-built for the cloud, fully taking advantage of all the performance and security benefits the cloud offers. In short, cloud-native solutions are generally faster to deploy, updates can be rolled out instantly, and they can more easily integrate with other cloud-native tools.
The Benefits of SaaS Test Automation
Software as a service (SaaS) test automation is a way for organizations to seamlessly scale testing without managing on-premises or cloud resources themselves. Instead, the SaaS solution handles all of the infrastructure for testing, which includes managing physical or cloud servers, installing and maintaining operating systems and software, and much more. Quality teams can simply access the SaaS testing platform through the Internet and implement their software testing strategies.
Automated Cloud Testing with mabl
Mabl is a low-code test automation platform that provides cloud-native benefits like high-performance test execution, infinite scalability, high availability, and enterprise-grade security. This testing-as-a-service approach removes the burden of managing infrastructure or connecting different packages and frameworks so that your quality team can spend more time on actually improving software quality.
With mabl cloud, you can create tests once and execute them in parallel across different browsers and mobile device profiles to streamline your testing efforts. By leveraging a single, centralized SaaS testing platform, your quality team can increase coverage and accelerate testing to meet the needs of high-velocity development teams.
Ready to migrate to cloud-based automated testing? Register for mabl’s 14-day free trial and begin creating automated tests within minutes!
