What are the Primary Benefits of Cloud Testing?

As organizations adopt agile workflows, quality assurance professionals are under pressure to find new means of testing that will help support this initiative. Using cloud testing, resources like hardware and software that are available on-demand are assessed to ensure that they meet functional and nonfunctional requirements. Cloud testing has emerged as an asset in the software development lifecycle and has already proven to be beneficial to QA teams. Here are a few of the primary advantages teams can expect to see from cloud testing:

1. Lower costs
QA members know just how expensive it can be to test an application and fix any issues that emerge. There are testing tool licensing and infrastructure costs that can quickly ramp up, especially for larger teams or if a group delivers a significant number of projects per year. However, cloud testing allows the organization to regain control of its expenses. The platform's elasticity ensures that tools can be easily scaled to a team's needs, often on a pay-as-you-use basis. This mitigates the need to implement more computing power that will likely be underutilized, reaping huge cost savings.

2. Unlimited availability
One benefit of the cloud is that users can access their resources from any device, as long as they have an Internet connection. Going back to the first advantage, this means that hardware and software investment is no longer a priority. Instead, QA teams can test wherever and whenever they want. Software Testing Help contributor Sneha Nadig noted that the cloud's dynamic availability enables QA to generate conditions that are reflective of real-life traffic situations, which can be crucial for assessing a project's scalability and optimal performance.

"Almost most of you will agree that the environment supplied to testing teams very rarely matches a customer environment on account of rapidly changing requirements, as a result of which it is very challenging for companies to keep up," Nadig wrote. "Cloud is the answer to this problem whereby users can easily replicate a customer environment and find defects early in the cycle."

3. Supports agile workflows
With agile testing quickly replacing waterfall development methods, testing should be able to support the new approach. Cloud testing can boost agile ideals by providing a platform that is inherently collaborative. By hosting resources like test management solution in these environments, organizations can involve members in all parts of the development process and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Assets in the cloud are also automatically updated, which means that all users will have the most current information available immediately. If disparate teams are working on the same app, their progress can be easily monitored, reducing the potential for redundancies and errors in the system.

Cloud testing can also facilitate agile ideas like continuous integration. Being able to constantly test ensures that new pieces of code can be deployed much faster than ever before. This can keep teams on a schedule and help to deliver patches, features and other functionality when needed.

4. Customizable for testing needs
New devices are entering the workforce at a rapid pace, and employees are increasingly expecting to use this hardware for their jobs. QA is under pressure to test the apps across these devices and ensure that everything is working appropriately. However, it is traditionally been easier said than done. Company staff are no longer tethered to their desks. They're on their phones and tablets, completing daily tasks which facilitate mobile testing. But many QA teams do not test specifically for this hardware, which can adversely affect the user experience and drive employees to use alternative applications.

The cloud provides the opportunity to test multiple routes to a system. QA professionals can perform load and performance testing on each scenario to determine how different permutations will impact the program on a particular device. This type of flexibility can help teams determine what actions should be taken to make software more compatible for a specific device, leading to higher quality applications that better meet user functionality requirements.

Cloud testing can provide a variety of benefits to organizations as they move to agile processes. By incorporating this approach in QA test management workflows, teams can move faster and achieve significant advantages as a result.