12-04-2014, 11:50 AM
AN OVERVIEW OF CLOUD TESTING AS A SERVICE
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ABSTRACT
Testing is an important process for software quality assurance. A cloud infrastructure creates
significant new opportunities for software quality assurance and testing. Making the test
infrastructure that directly represents the production cloud infrastructure is too expensive –
in terms of hardware, software licenses and testing professionals. To deal with this challenge
the paper gives an overview of various cloud testing strategies and also introduces ‘Testing
as a Service’, using Cloud computing.
INTRODUCTION
Cloud Testing uses cloud infrastructure for software testing. Cloud computing [2] at it
simplest is internet-based computing, with the use of shared resources and software provided
on demand with reduced management effort. As a service it is still at an early stage, but the
growth of cloud-based computing is outstripping even the most optimistic predictions.
That growth is based on a convincing value proposition: speed to market, agility to bring
forward or retire service. Although cloud computing is still in its infancy, it is increasingly
clear that the cloud model will supplement, if not entirely replace, mainframe and
client/server installations in the years to come.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
as offered by VMware, Citrix, Dell, HP, IBM, Disco,
F5, Juniper, and others. These companies offer the building blocks of cloud services
that are available through a number of cloud hosting services such as Amazon’s
Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). They include a virtualization layer, database, web,
and application servers, firewalls, server load balancers, WAN optimizers, routers,
and switches.
Stress Test
Stress Test is used to determine ability of application to maintain a certain level of
effectiveness beyond breaking point. It is essential for any application to work even under
excessive stress and maintain stability [7]. Stress testing assures this by creating peak loads
using simulators. But the cost of creating such scenarios is enormous. Instead of investing
capital in building on-premise testing environments, cloud testing offers affordable and
scalable alternative.
CONCLUSION
Testing of cloud components and systems requires a range of techniques – some benchmark
and some new. The factors that makes cloud computing so attractive: virtualization, poses an
interesting challenge for network and application testing. Virtualization of the test tools
themselves provides the key to testing the cloud. As the
advent of cloud technology and testing as services, more research work must be done to
address the open issues and challenges in cloud testing and TaaS.