TechBuzzard 
Nowadays it has become crucial for testing organizations, modern development architecture, and delivery methods, to release high-quality applications faster than ever before. In this article, we are going to learn all about test automation cloud.
For this reason, many organizations are implementing and investing in agile ways of working and DevOps. Test automation is a fundamental component of DevOps. It helps in simplifying the testing processes with minimal effort and impacts positively on the quality of the application releases, associated costs, and their time to market.
Automating the tedious, time-consuming, and repetitive testing tasks enables the development team to save the time and effort needed to perform those tasks and focus on more value-creating and innovative work.
Adopting new technologies and ways of working is vital to meet customer needs for better applications. The latest and modernized version of test automation that the testing teams are moving to is cloud-based automation testing. Turning to automation testing on the cloud provides the organization an opportunity to gain bunches of benefits by further modernizing the testing phase.
In this article, we are going to learn all about cloud automation testing. Before we begin with the cloud automation testing it is important to understand the cloud computing concept first. Let’s start with the definition.
Cloud Testing
Cloud computing is an internet-based platform that remotely provides various computing services like hardware, software, and other computer-related services.
In Cloud Testing the applications are tested for functional as well as non-functional requirements using cloud computing services. It guarantees faster and more scalable testing with the flexibility to save testing time as well as costs.
The three Cloud Computing models are
- SaaS(Software as a service)- here applications are available to the users on-demand through the internet connection. Here the quality is assured by testing the data security, integrity, performance, compatibility, and scalability of the application.
- PaaS(Platform as a service)- PaaS supports a complete web application lifecycle such as building, testing, deploying, managing, and updating in the same integrated environment. PaaS helps you to get away from the expense and complexity of buying and managing software licenses as it works on a pay-as-you-go basis.
- IaaS(Infrastructure as a service)- It mainly includes physical resources like Storage, network devices, and computing servers. All these computing resources are accessible on-demand, which means as per the usage the user needs to pay for it
Types Of Cloud
There are 3 types of cloud formations namely-
- Public clouds (available to everyone).
- Private clouds (available only to the users within the organization).
- Hybrid clouds (mixture of both private and public clouds). Here organizations decide what services they want to reveal to everyone and what only to the users within the organization.
Essential components that cloud testing puts emphasis on are
- Testing applications functionality, end-to-end workflows, performance, data security, browser compatibility testing, and much more
- Testing different network bandwidths, and successful transfer of data over networks, and protocols.
- Validating infrastructure for regulatory compliances, disaster recovery testing, storage policies, backups, and secure connections.
Automation Testing in Cloud
Cloud-based test automation is an approach to application development that uses cloud technology and provides a test environment to accelerate testing, and confirm intended functionality and application releases. Testing on the cloud is an excellent way to modernize your application development. It is ideal for teams desiring to reduce testing cycles and increase release rates. Running automated parallel tests in the cloud help the team to find and fix bugs, and increase the efficiency of their quality assurance processes.
Automation on the cloud is attained by spinning up test environments on demand. Letting the development teams continuously develop, test, and release applications without needing new infrastructure. This results in more test environments and faster test execution. Your cloud solution handles your monotonous tasks of performing regression testing so that the team can spend their valuable time and energy on other development work.
Why automation test in the cloud
Spending time creating different test cases using different types of test data is a time taking task. Therefore having all the usable test data stored at a single place or a storage facility will save a lot of time. The perfect solution for this is automation which uses the stored data in this file to run multiple times without any manual effort.
Below are some of the reasons why test automation in cloud environments is important.
- Reduced costs- Since cloud infrastructure provides a number of staging environments to your specifications, you don’t need to buy, set up, and maintain expensive hardware, or data centers. Automating your testing process frees up valuable resources to work on other projects. This saves you money.
- Time Effective- Automated tests executing the same test cases repeatedly via automation can save you a significant amount of time as regression and other repeated tests can be run without wasting too much time on repetitive tasks.
- Better Collaboration- Efficient cloud testing can accelerate and enhance collaboration between teams or members of the team. Since testing environments exist on the cloud, multiple teams across different locations, and even remote teams, will be able to access the same cloud configurations and collaborate on common goals in real-time.
- High Productivity and Enhanced App Quality- Cloud automated testing, allows the developers and testers to spend less time on testing so that they can utilize their effort focussing on other critical tasks or creating new features. This enables them to boost the test coverage and ensures a high-quality performing app.
- Faster results and Quick Feedback- Cloud-based test automation improves scalability. It lets you run multiple tests simultaneously with parallel execution, and get the results fast. Instant feedback encourages the developers to take quick action and fix bugs if any.
- Versatility- The cloud makes it easier to simulate using various operating conditions that can be easily simulated like checking how code handles heavy traffic loads, global users, different devices, and more.
Challenges in Cloud Testing
Cloud computing environments come with. Below are a set of challenges that the organizations need to deal with.
Interface compatibility Check
While upgrading the Cloud service provider, the external interface at times also gets updated. This can be problematic for users who are used to the older interface. Hence it is necessary for Cloud(SaaS) subscribers to let the users choose the interface version they wanted to work with.
Data safety and Privacy
Security is a major concern in the world of cloud-based computing. Cloud applications being multi-tenant in nature, there always remains a persistent concern with the possibility of security risks. As all the data is hosted in the cloud, the chance of data theft could continue to exist, data may get spread from one tenant to other tenants on the same machine. Therefore, users must be provided assurances about their data security as part of a cloud testing strategy.
Transferring Data
Data migration from one Cloud provider to another is a massive challenge because the database schemas of two providers may vary. And it requires a lot of exertion to understand the data fields, relationships, and their mapping across SaaS applications.
Private cloud
Private cloud networks are used by some organizations to maintain a balance between the scalability of cloud technology and the security of on-premises solutions. But building and managing a private cloud is not a top priority for many organizations, especially for those who are likely to implement such a solution.
Although Creating a private cloud and having all the data in-house will produce a significant benefit. But IT departments will need to face building and attaching it all together by themselves, this causes greater difficulty to move to cloud computing. Private solutions need to be carefully addressed
Performance issues
Greater functioning and high Performing applications are essential for any organization. The downtime in the network bandwidth on the cloud directly affects the functioning, execution, and delivery of complex cloud-based applications. Interruption can happen in any technology. Over the past few years, several cloud vendors have experienced failures over the past few years. In such situations, it becomes challenging for the users to rely on such providers.
Integration of Enterprise Applications
Some applications in production require integration that is needed to connect with other Cloud applications, which could be on-premise. Integration requires validation for applications that are currently operating with existing data structures that are from client networks to SaaS applications and vice versa. There is uncertainty amongst organizations regarding data privacy and interaction among the applications hosted on the Cloud.
Automation Testing on LambdaTest cloud
Once testable features of the application are created, they require to be tested for performance, security, reliability, and scalability. Keeping in mind the extent of device fragmentation, it must be tested on real browsers and devices. Else, there will be flaws in functioning under real user conditions.
Setting up an in-house device lab, and every time regularly updating them with thousands of newly released devices, and investing extensively in maintaining it at needed levels of security seems extremely expensive and exhausting.
Hence opting for automation testing platforms or a cloud device farm like LambdaTest is much easier and an ideal choice.
LambdaTest provides instant access to a wide range of more than 3000 browsers, devices, and operating system combinations to perform automated tests remotely. This lets the testing teams concentrate on testing without worrying about device availability. It gets both the power of manual and automated testing to meet all the requirements of an organization.
You can exponentially increase browser coverage by executing your test scripts on a cloud of 3000+ different desktop and mobile environments. You can leverage various automated testing tools like Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Puppeteer, and more.
This cloud-based cross-browser compatibility testing platform allows users to test on the cloud from anywhere and at any time. On this scalable cloud you can create several on-demand test environments, and dynamically adjust your testing capacity to meet your needs.
With real-time analytics & seamless integration between test design, monitoring, and reporting, LambdaTest enables convenient and efficient testing.
LambdaTest assures high-security levels, reasonably consistent tech support, and shortened wait times for queued tests, without compromising on quality or security. Shortened release cycles boost the teams’ efficiency and enable them to meet their goals faster, with greater accuracy and minimal investment.
Other features it includes are a customizable dashboard as well as real-time feedback, Parallel execution of test scenarios on multiple devices at the same time, multiple language support, Multi-OS, and Multi-Browser testing, 24×7 device availability, and many more
Conclusion
In today’s fast-moving world everything from gaming to storing data is moving to the cloud. Test automation on the cloud brings a wide range of advantages like no initial time and cost, 24/7 access to resources, improved team collaboration, multiple test environments support, faster delivery of apps to the market, and many more..
Hence it can be concluded that despite the challenges there are tons of benefits of automation testing on the cloud. The cloud platform is the future of testing, and combining automation testing and the cloud together makes the best combination for faster and executing automation testing at scale.
Also Read : Looking For A Job ? Beware Of The Use Of Social Networks
About Author
