The shorter the TTM (Time To Market), the better it would be for any IT organization, and in order to achieve this, a test automation cloud can prove to be useful. The main purpose of cloud testing is to simulate testing environments on the cloud. This blog-post on cloud testing delves deeply into the principles of cloud testing and the best test automation clouds available in the market. We will also talk about the important advantages of cloud-based testing for web application testing. So, read-on!
What Is Automation Testing on Cloud?
Internet-based test automated software development speeds up testing and software releases by using cloud automation. Your software development teams may build, test, and deliver digital goods continually without the need for additional infrastructure by spinning up test environments as and when required. Therefore, more test managements lead to quicker test execution. This is an eccentric way to update your software development, but, unfortunately, it is not a universal approach.
So it is really great if you’re testing your software locally and releasing it often enough to keep up with user demand. You maintain doing that if your current infrastructure allows for enough test environments for your teams to simultaneously release new features and patch issues. That is how you were, then. Teams aiming to shorten testing cycles and speed up release velocity should consider cloud-based test automation. It has clear benefits, but it may also create some challenges.
It must be taken into account as part of your organization’s software development strategy, regardless of whether you shift all of your testing to the cloud, mix it with your current infrastructure, or maintain all testing on-premises. Whatever approach you choose with, be sure that it doesn’t compromise your organization’s ability to innovate and face the future head-on.
Benefits of Cloud Automation Testing
Let’s look at some benefits that cloud automation testing offers.
- Increased cooperation
Whether your colleagues are across the hall or on the other side of the globe, cloud technology allows teams to work together on shared objectives. Your remote Dev and QA teams may cooperate on the same products in real-time by automating test execution in the cloud, doing away with the bottlenecks that historically characterized isolated teams.
Cloud-based test automation offers quicker feedback loops, improving team visibility throughout the CI/CD pipeline and providing useful information about the performance of your SUTs.
By bringing digital goods to market quicker than rivals, this expedites software deployment and gives your business a competitive edge.
- Scalability
With minimum disturbance, cloud computing has always enabled fast scaling up IT resources as demand changes. Cloud-based test automation is the same. By automating the scalability of test execution utilizing cloud infrastructure, organizations may thereby grow or reduce their testing capacity as test needs change.
Conflicts occur when teams compete for scarce resources, which has been a long-standing problem in software testing. Release of a much-needed feature vs bug fixes for versions already in use: which is more crucial? When you only have a few test environments, this problem arises all too often. In order to test a new feature or resolve a problem, teams may now instantly set up test environments for any narrative branch. Your teams may now access testing infrastructure immediately without the restrictions or delays brought on by local installation or physical hardware.
- Putting your organization’s future in order
Your staff’ ability to conceive up fresh approaches to provide your consumers better goods is essential to future-proofing your company. People spend too much time on repetitive jobs they don’t think can be automated. Exploratory testing is a kind of user journey testing that generally involves humans and takes place outside of the happy routes that your test scripts can automate. AI-guided exploratory testing significantly increases test coverage for your app without involving a human. Your teams’ ability to concentrate on other, more manual-centric testing due to the higher degrees of test automation made possible by automation testing on the cloud.
To make sure that your applications perform to their greatest potential, accessibility and usability must always be given top priority. Resilience testing, which can help you determine how effectively your applications and systems react to and recover from stressors and shocks, is another activity you might invest time in.
- Cost savings
You may save money by transferring your test automation to the cloud. Purchasing servers along with data centers, and other physical infrastructure on your own is expensive. Let’s not forget to mention the price of personnel and maintenance to keep everything operational.
In addition to this, if your organization is growing quickly, the cost of deploying extra servers to accommodate growing testing demands soars. Cloud environments do away with everything mentioned above. Additionally, your cloud service provider will pay for all necessary gear, infrastructure, and upkeep, eliminating the need for exorbitant up-front expenses.
You may dynamically alter your testing capacity to fit your demands since the cloud allows you to construct several on-demand test environments. The productivity of your team is further increased by the accelerated release cycles made possible by cloud-based test automation.
- Parallelization
Cloud-based test automation increases the scalability of test execution. Testing teams may execute numerous pre-configured test environments concurrently using parallelization, replicating different testing settings for your systems under test. The same program may be launched on several virtual machines using this technique in various software versions.
In contrast to this, the same program may be used on a variety of hardware, browsers, and also operating systems. When testing are complete in these particular settings, the findings are sent back, and the computers may be shut off and destroyed without any user data being stored.
Top Test Automation Clouds in 2022
Here’s a list of top 12 test automation clouds that we have curated just for you. Have a look:
- Akamai CloudTest
In order to enable automated and knowledgeable real-time testing on cloud infrastructures, CloudTest is a platform that helps you to evaluate the performance of the cloud. DevOps teams wishing to employ a test engine that can mimic real-world performance conditions may find Akamai CloudTest to be a useful option.
No matter the test load, CloudTest can quickly identify and document problems in your apps. DevOps may use in-depth analytics machines with CloudTest that can test and analyze various simulated load amounts for a quick response. The CloudTest analytical machines can test APIs, databases, and websites’ backend performance in addition to business networks and cloud applications.
- SOASTA CloudTest
Mobile functional and performance testing as well online-based functional and performance testing are two of the four forms of test automation that are possible on this single web platform. To test the program under heavy loads, it may simulate millions of concurrent visitors accessing a website from different locations.
CloudTest makes testing simple and effective with real-time analytics and seamless interaction between test creation, monitoring, and reporting. The free CloudTest Lite edition has less functionality than the full version.
- BlazeMeter
It is used to test the performance and load of mobile applications, websites, and APIs from the beginning to the very end. It is JMeter compliant and has around one million user simulation capacity. Realistic load testing and performance monitoring are made possible, along with immediate reporting.
- AppPerfect
AppPerfect is one of the solutions on this list that is useful for both developers and large data operations in addition to testers. AppPerfect provides web testing, load testing, and security testing via its cloud menu by integrating salesforce capabilities.
You may download a number of alternative testing modules on the system in addition to cloud testing. AppPerfect offers free one-hour installation and product orientation help. Instead of being operated via a terminal, AppPerfect cloud automation testing features a slick GUI. GUI has the extra benefit of being simple to use and eliminating the need to memorize lengthy terminal commands. If you decide against writing your own scripts, AppPerfect offers a workaround. You have the option to specify the test requirement and have scripts sent to you using AppPerfect.
Distributed testing is made possible by the AppPerfect cloud automation testing solution, allowing testers to execute their test scripts on several computers linked to the cloud. The report is then compiled in one location and given a thorough examination for the team. With the help of this test automation cloud, testers may set a certain time for their test scripts to execute. This is quite useful if you need to set a nightly test run or need to periodically evaluate the performance.
- AWS Device Farm
AWS Device Farm is on our list of the most popular cloud automation testing tools for mobile sites as well as mobile applications. It was created in Portland and bought by the cloud computing company AWS in 2015.
The genuine Android and iOS devices in AWS Device Farm. It was formerly known as AppThwack. It can seamlessly conduct automated testing and provide accurate real-time analysis, have long been the service’s main selling point. You may obtain a preview of your application’s market performance in advance since the devices are actual ones.
- Cloudsleuth
A cloud-based testing tool called Cloudsleuth makes it simple to test, track, as well as record the functionality of online applications. In order to improve teamwork, the program also enables users to communicate test findings with other team members.
Furthermore, Cloudsleuth makes it simple for businesses to model actual user traffic and load circumstances for their online apps. The program also proposes a variety of capabilities for assessing and resolving performance problems with web applications.
- Xamarin Test Cloud
It is a tool for UI acceptability testing in mobile applications. It enables the creation of tests in either Ruby using the Calabash framework or C# using the NUnit testing library using the UITest framework. In addition to displaying full-resolution screen images of each phase and pertinent information like CPU and memory consumption and test duration, the application conducts the test on over a thousand actual physical devices. For continuous integration, it may be included in automated builds.
- Nessus
Nessus is a commonly used vulnerability scanner. It is capable of identifying flaws, incorrect setups, and unapplied fixes in a variety of hardware, including virtualized systems, firewalls, cloud infrastructure, and much more. It may be used to identify risks, including malware, backdoors, viruses, and online services that lead to harmful information. It may also be used to carry out compliance audits for industries like banking and healthcare. It produces scan results and suggestions for corrective action in a variety of forms, including sending targeted emails.
- Wireshark
The traffic that circulates on a computer network may be captured and interactively browsed with this network protocol analyzer. Both a sniffer tool and a testing tool may be used with Wireshark. It is helpful for analysis, software & communications protocol creation, teaching, and network troubleshooting.
- Jenkins Dev@Cloud
It makes cloud integration, continuous deployment, and development easier. Jenkins Dev@Cloud permits distribution to an unlimited number of services and development in several languages. It offers a large range of mobile development tools and enables safe cloud-based connections to already installed systems. It incorporates the advantages of external systems like Cloud Foundry, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Google App Engine.
- Watir
An open-source program called Watir can automate web browsers for testing. The browser and the cloud-based testing tool communicate similarly to how people do: linking, completing forms, and confirming material
Regression testing is possible, and it is straightforward and simple to utilize for new users. It may also be used to find problems with your apps, such as performance problems, UI defects, and functional errors.
The best test automation clouds you may use for your apps in 2022 are covered in this post.
One such cloud-based platform for cross-browser testing is LambdaTest. This platform enables you to test your website or application on more than 3000 different browser, and operating system, as well as device emulation combinations. Your organization can speed up their efforts for testing website and web apps and raise the caliber of their web products by using simultaneous execution on LambdaTest’s cloud-based Selenium Grid. Your team has to change as well, it’s time, make the decision, before it is too late!
Conclusion
We will continue to see an increase in the transfer of organizational resources to the cloud due to the benefits cloud storage has over on-premise or conventional storage. Organizations who have moved or are getting ready to move their resources to the cloud have an increasing demand for cloud automation testing as this trend continues unabatedly. The availability of more cloud testing tools on the market helps numerous organizations resolve problems that can degrade the quality of their cloud-based apps.