How long can you stay without your phone and Wi-Fi? Hardly a few minutes, and your hands will subconsciously reach out to your phone. We live in the ‘digital’ age where the entire world has created a dependency on digital platforms to carry out a wide range of activities. The ease and comfort offered by the virtual world has made the digital devices an inseparable part of our lives. The increasing scenario of digitization has given rise to app-centric culture which has increased the demand for apps in the recent times. To ensure the apps serve the users best while offering a seamless experience, it should be thoroughly tested before the release and made sure it is error-free.
As emphasize on testing is increasing, organizations are coming up with innovative testing solutions that can offer excellent results while aligning with the new-age development processes. There are many testing approaches that organizations are adopting such as code-based testing, codeless test automation, and shift left testing to name a few; however, Cloud-based testing is the most preferred for the wide range of benefits it offers. In this era of digital transformation, Cloud testing is the one that supports all the functional and non-functional aspects with utmost ease and speed. Its affordability is another important parameter that made it even more popular.
What is Cloud testing?
Cloud testing is one of the potent buzzwords of the software testing industry which has gained immense popularity recently. Cloud testing infers to evaluating the software quality by testing it on Cloud environment with pre-requisite infrastructure. It allows to efficiently test all the functional and non-functional aspects faster with improved stability, scalability, and flexibility while saving significantly on time and cost. Its 24/7 availability has made it the most desirable solution for testing both web and mobile apps.
The common tests that are performed over Cloud are:
- Functional testing
- Performance testing
- Operating system version testing
- Bandwidth & Latency testing
- Phone model testing
- Load testing
- UI testing
- Stress testing
Software testing has seen a major transformation with the introduction of Cloud services. The previously tedious and expensive testing on all versions of real devices has been eased tremendously by using Cloud-based testing, while cutting on the cost immensely. The immense benefits it has offered has accounted for its huge market of $9.7 billion in 2021, which is further expected to touch enormous $21.67 billion by 2028. This huge market is on rise and will transform the software testing market at a rapid pace.
Why Cloud testing for digital transformation?
There are a plenty of reasons why Cloud testing is being considered for digital transformation. Some of the important reasons for considering Cloud testing are as follows:
Flexibility: Conducting testing on Cloud is extremely flexible, no need of bulky infrastructure or specialized office space to conduct the testing, all you need is a stable internet connection and testing can be performed from anywhere, anytime. It allows to make changes on real-time, hence, the changes are updated instantaneously. It also gives huge scope to create and scale tests with ease.
New-age testing practice: As digital transformation demands business agility and flexibility; organizations are adopting modern development approaches like DevOps and agile methodologies for improved performance. Cloud based testing is the best practice to customize the testing according to the developmental method and other requirements. Such customization flexibility can be experienced only with Cloud testing.
CI/CD support: Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) is an integral part of the agile DevOps software development practices. In the CI/CD pipeline where continuous integration is being made, it is essential to incorporate continuous testing to check the effectiveness, stability, scalability, etc. Cloud testing offers the best environment to perform continuous testing and yield effective results.
Device Cloud: Device Cloud or Device Farm is an important Cloud testing approach that addresses the issue of fragmentation. With the number of versions of mobile devices increasing at an intense rate, testing the app across all the devices get highly challenging due to the difference in OS versions, screen sizes, screen resolutions, etc. Companies would require all the physical devices to perform testing; while virtual simulators and emulators can be considered as an option, but they are found not to yield the expected results. Device Cloud provides access to all the versions of the device, hence, providing the most efficient and affordable testing option.
Scalability: Cloud allows high scalability, which allows the testers to check the app performance during peak traffic. Testing scalability is a difficult affair as most of the testing environment fail to recreate the real-world traffic scenario and doesn’t provide enough scalability to test how the application would behave under such unrealistic traffic. Cloud offers easy and quick scaling with minimal or no disruption, making it one of the popular software testing environments.
Reducing manual effort: Most of the organizations still go for manual tests, which could be full of hassles. Cloud-based testing can be proven to be useful under this scenario, as it offers pre-configured testing environment and the real-world scenarios to run the tests. It has given exceptional results and helped many organizations to achieve their quality goal within their budget.
Affordable: Cloud-based testing is by the most affordable option available for Cloud testing. As testing can be conducted remotely from anywhere and anytime, the cost that goes in investing heavily on infrastructure can be saved. Further, testing can be conduced using virtual simulators and emulators over Cloud, making the whole process cost-effective. One of the reasons that makes Cloud-based testing the most preferred by companies apart from its effective solutions is its affordability. Its cost-effective nature is also one of its USPs making it popular among testers worldwide.
Conclusion
Choosing Cloud based testing is a great way to improve the efficiency of the testing process. Cloud-based testing comes with a unique set of benefits, has streamlined the QA process, eased the workflow, and saving on time and cost. Cloud-based testing tools mimic the real-world environment and traffic and test the application. Many interesting innovations have come into picture with the onset of Cloud services. With these innovations making their presence at a much faster rate, Cloud-based testing is only going to rise in the coming years.
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