In order to improve the testing in the developmental process many companies are implementing agile ways of working to come up with this demand and to bring with it a new approach to testing processes. Test automation plays an important role as it allows the development teams to automate mundane and tedious aspects of applications testing and increase the effectiveness and coverage for application testing and hence concentrate on other creative and innovative works.
With the opportunity to further modernize and improve the testing process more companies are turning towards cloud-based platforms as it has become apparent nowadays. Now, the question is, what do we mean by turning to cloud-based platforms. So, let’s get to it in a more detailed way.
A cloud-based platform is a testing platform that allows the use of technology to carry out tasks with lessened human assistance hence eliminating manual efforts. Cloud-based testing is a vital part of an automated enterprise. It is to speed up the testing process and quick release application. That means it allows automating some or all manual tasks related to managing and operating cloud-based infrastructure. Learn more about How Cloud Automation Testing Helps The Development Process at www.digital-polyphony.com
The testing of the cloud-based applications using resources provided by the cloud is called cloud testing. The resources can be the infrastructure needed to carry out the tests. The reason for cloud automation testing is to test the application’s functional and non-functional requirements to ensure faster availability, flexibility, and scalability to reduce costs of application testing without getting impacted and achieve workflow targets.
It allows the development teams to apply cloud automation in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments without the need to arrange new infrastructure. It is an internet-based platform and an end-to-end solution to modernize the testing process and increase the organization’s competitiveness.
Need to use cloud automation
Modern technologies are vast and ever-evolving and the burden of managing tasks associated with emerging technologies multiplies. Manually deploying functions such as scaling, configuring resources, setting up virtual machines, monitoring performance is tedious, ineffective, and prone to errors.
With the rise in popularity, decreasing cost, increase in productivity, and the reduction in errors. For this reason, the step to move to a cloud platform has become an attractive option for testing companies. Cloud automation helps to reduce repetitive and manual tasks to manage workloads.
Successful progression to a cloud infrastructure helps to burden off-shoulder tasks such as managing security, automated storage and backups, deploy codes, change in configuration and setting, and many more. In a cloud environment utilizing automation to run workloads leads to maximizing budget and resources.
After having an idea about where cloud automation is needed here are some more examples to note which more tasks can be automated.
- In application development and testing.
- Detecting and monitoring errors.
- Multi-cloud interaction.
- Data backup.
- Establish version control workflow.
- Delivering fast, secure and reliable applications.
Tips to get started with cloud automation testing
If you decide to make the move for cloud-based test automation as it involves the benefit of faster and better application release. There are a few tips you can consider before getting started.
The first thing to keep in mind is how quickly you can release software if you are getting access to more test environments. If you are struggling over features to be updated or bug fixing or your release is delayed because of lacking test environments. You must see whether Cloud-based automation testing is easing these limitations.
Secondly, you need to understand whether it is financially feasible or not. That means seeing the benefits of faster release of applications against the cost structure of using a cloud testing environment and accordingly does the comparison of whether it is practicable to move your testing capability to the cloud.
Another thing you need to figure out before making your leap is whether it is a public or private cloud and is meeting your testing requirements. As public cloud provides the benefit of parallelization, scalability, improved collaboration, and faster application release. Whereas the private cloud provides you with the extra advantage of extra security of your data to remain behind your own corner.
Cloud-based testing types
Cloud testing ensures that functional and non-functional testing requirements of an application are met properly. The different types of testing that can be performed in the cloud are discussed below.
Functional testing- It is performed to ensure that the requirement of the application is providing all the services that the user is paying for. That means the aim here is to make sure that the particular function of an application is performing as they were expected to. The need for cloud-based applications is to offer flexibility on multiple platforms without resulting in any issue and offers seamless move around cloud infrastructure. This testing offers this feature.
Performance testing- This testing is performed to find out limitations, and bottlenecks under a particular workload. Using cloud testing makes it easy to come up with such issues and create environments that vary the nature of traffic on demand. This helps in reducing time and cost by simulating geographically targeted users.
Stress and load testing- Stress testing is performed to find out the ability of an application to maintain effectiveness beyond breaking point. Instead of creating peak load simulators and investing enormously in such scenarios Cloud testing offers a scalable alternative. Load testing allows creating heavy user traffic and calculates its response.
Regression testing- Regression testing ensures that the continuous upgrade and update of an application has not impacted the features and usability of the application to provide a better user experience. But so much testing needs a lot of hard work. So conducting regression tests with the cloud will be easier with increased efficiency.
Other testing includes security testing, compatibility testing, browser performance testing, availability testing, and many more.
Benefits of cloud-based test automation
Cloud automation testing provides the use of several on-demand test practices to perform automated tests and reduce manual work and fix errors quickly. Beyond these obvious benefits, cloud automation has additional benefits too. Let us get into detail about what more you can acquire from cloud-based automation.
1. Reduced cost
Purchasing servers, data centers, managing and maintaining their infrastructure are expensive. To cope with the rapidly growing testing environments need more spending. The decision to move test automation to the cloud environment is cost-saving. As the cost is pushed on to the cloud service provider.
2. Faster testing
Test automation speeds up testing but cloud-based test automation provides a larger number of test environments that reduce testing cycles, shorten the feedback loop and quicker bug fixing which means the quick release of features. Shortened release cycles by cloud-based test automation, in turn, increase the efficiency of testing teams. It helps to deliver improved applications to the market and leads to a progressively better user experience.
3. Parallelization
Parallelization allows the testing team to fasten multiple test environments simultaneously that imitate many testing parameters of an application under test. Doing this way different versions of the same application can be run on many virtual machines. The same application can be alternatively run across multiple browsers, devices, and operating systems. After the completion of tests in any of the environments, the results are reported back without user data being retained.
4. Scalability
Cloud-based automation has solved many problems in application testing. Such as with limited resources the challenge for releasing requested features or issues with bug fixing with an existing version that too with a lesser number of testing environments.
Nowadays it has become easier to spin up test environments with the availability of testing with cloud-based infrastructure at the touch of a button. It provides a needed environment to fix a bug quickly and test a new feature easily. Cloud-based testing automation always supports the ability to scale an organization’s resources up or down their testing capabilities by automating the scaling of test automation with quickly changing demands of testing.
5. Improved data backups
To protect against accidental erasure, equipment failure, or configuration calamity. It is very important to frequently back up the system. Cloud platforms automatically do the backup to the cloud to improve the organization’s flexibility to disaster.
6. Innovative and future proof organization
Long-term and innovative organizations rely on team members who can invest better time and energy to deliver hassle-free products to customers in better ways. Instead of spending too much time on repetitive and tedious tasks. Automated-testing increases test coverage of the application without the need for human intervention.
Testing in the cloud enables an increased level of test automation and to leverage the expertise and creativity of their best people to resolve and work for more human-centric testing and real problems instead of being stuck down with repetitive tasks.
Cloud automation testing if implemented properly offers the organization to save team time and money. Fewer errors can lead to constructing a more predictable and reliable workflow and contribute directly to a better and future-proof organization.
Moving towards the end as we have gained much knowledge about cloud-based automation testing it can be said that it is not becoming popular just without any reason. And it is also to mention that practical experience with this will bring you more hidden surprises than just having limited knowledge.
Performing cloud automation testing using the LambdaTest platform
If you are looking for a platform for your cloud automation testing, you can use platforms like LambdaTest to fulfill your requirement.
LambdaTest is an online cloud-based automated testing platform that provides an online Selenium Grid on the cloud with instant access over a combination of more than 3000 devices, browsers, and operating systems with their respective versions.
It allows its users to test from anywhere at any time in the cloud. Another important feature of LambdaTest is that it can be integrated with other testing frameworks and CI/CD tools. In addition, LambdaTest also offers HyperTest – a lightning- fast text execution cloud that is 70% quicker than any conventional Selenium grid clouds.
LambdaTest provides a secure, reliable, and scalable solution for your testing processes and ensures to save time and money.
