Introduction
Organizations have been increasingly being interested into the readily available business applications available in the market with the main benefit that the time to market is considerably short. The businesses are majorly interested in this because the profit is driven by the lack of capital budget for the carrying out the development of the applications as well as testing them. This has resulted into an increase in the demand of Software as a service based applications which as a result triggers the need of SaaS software testing.
According to a research study done by IBM it was found that 50 percent of the technology is devoted for development of the applications and testing the applications up. Said that out of which 90 percent of the test infrastructure available remains idle throughout hence causing a lot of wastage and added cost for the project. Another study suggested that the delay of a second in uploading the web page causes affects the customer conversion rate by 7% and also decreases the customer satisfaction by 16% hence it is not advisable to have a delay in uploading the page which can be considerably reduced when using SaaS applications.
Not only does the cloud computing brings new opportunities for doing business but also causes some major impacts on the way software testing is done conventionally. Under SaaS software testing the SaaS provider undertakes the testing of the software of a given application via cloud infrastructure for its clients charging then as a service as per the usage.
Background
The concept of SaaS software testing is generated from the cloud computing. Cloud computing has been market famous because of the fact that it is cost effective and flexible in usage and consumption and provides a wide range of services, applications and processes for clients over the globe at any point of time. Cloud computing is the new tend because of the characteristics that it possess namely: scalability, service billing, flexibility, connectivity and advanced technologies. Cloud computing can accommodate a wide range of users at same time at different locations hence limiting the constraints with geographical location and multi usage acceptability.
Cloud computing can be categorized under three major categories namely:
SaaS: Software as a service provides a license for the user to use the application as a service. They use the application and pay for the time they have used. The applications are not purchased just used a service hence costing incredibly less than the amount spent in purchasing the application.
PaaS: Platform as a Service is used in case of software development. It helps in creation of the platform that is used for the generation of web applications without the cost affiliated with buying and maintaining the infrastructure.
IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service is a way of delivering the cloud facilities to the users. It includes all the components involved such as the servers, network and operating systems etc. as per the requirements without the cost affiliated with purchasing the same.
All the components cost a lot if purchased and when accessed only as per demand it cuts down the cost considerably hence reducing the budget and allocating it to other parts of the project. The innovation of this technology has hence marked the beginning of the new era where all the possible development and testing tasks can be done merely by using them as per requirement or demand.
Why is SaaS software testing important?
SaaS software testing refers to the validating the applications with business workflow, data integrity, compliance, performance, live upgrading testing and availability etc. by leveraging the cloud technology solutions. The main objectives that resulted in application of SaaS software testing are as follows:
1. Quality assurance of the cloud based applications that are deployed in the cloud. The quality assurance covers all the factors namely the functionality, business processes and its performance.
2. Validation of the software that the software works well on all the platforms without compromising the security. Also looks for the scalability of the application.
3. Compatibility is checked that ensures that the application is working fine with the API’s and check cloud for connectivity.
The main reasons for the usage of the cloud computing testing includes the following reasons:
• Reduced cost of the resource- the shared resources of the cloud are used by several users hence the cost affiliated to it is considerably lower than the cost of purchasing the same.
• The services are used as per the demand and hence it is possible to have a real time online validation for it over the network via usage of the cloud.
• Lastly the performance and scalability of the cloud based services is much higher for cloud based applications in comparison to the conventional software testing systems.
Current state of practice
Since the development of SaaS software testing variations has been designed to focus different objectives and requirements.
Testing a SaaS in cloud- this means that a SaaS application is tested in a cloud based environment. The application is checked for several functional and non-functional requirements and services.
Testing of a cloud- This means that an application is tested on SaaS based technique. The cloud is responsible for the testing as a service. The users are increasingly getting interested in this technique since it is more or less similar to using the outsourced technology for testing the application.
References
Gao, J., Bai, X., & Tsai, W. T. (2011). Cloud testing-issues, challenges, needs and practice. Software Engineering: An International Journal, 1(1), 9-23.
Riungu, L. M., Taipale, O., & Smolander, K. (2010, April). Software testing as an online service: Observations from practice. In Software Testing, Verification, and Validation Workshops (ICSTW), 2010 Third International Conference on (pp. 418-423). IEEE.
Yu, L., Tsai, W. T., Chen, X., Liu, L., Zhao, Y., Tang, L., & Zhao, W. (2010, June). Testing as a Service over Cloud. In Service Oriented System Engineering (SOSE), 2010 Fifth IEEE International Symposium on (pp. 181-188). Ieee.
Gao, J., Bai, X., Tsai, W. T., & Uehara, T. (2013, March). SaaS testing on clouds-Issues, challenges and needs. In Service Oriented System Engineering (SOSE), 2013 IEEE 7th International Symposium on (pp. 409-415). IEEE.