This is an introductory post to TaaS (Testing as a Service). If you have prior TaaS experience, feel free to share your thoughts.
TaaS leverages the cloud to offer scalable testing services to clients on an as-needed/on-demand basis. The goal is to offer highly accessible and available testing services at lesser cost. Test tools reside and test execution occurs on the cloud. Interfaces to access this service are provided e.g. via a web service, web app, etc. Normally, when talking of TaaS people think that only automated tests would be supported. However, TaaS involves the following models - all automated testing, manual (human run) or a hybrid model. Manual testing would be similar to an outsourced testing model which most of you may be familiar with.
Increasing costs - human resources, Labs & equipment - hardware/software, challenges with handling larger and complex products, several different types of testing to be performed, etc. As software gets more complex, inter-dependencies increase, support matrices multiply and the overall costs & complexity associated with testing keep rising.
TaaS offers to reduce hardware costs associated with maintaining labs in-house with elastic virtualized resources on the cloud at a much lower price point. Additionally, the number of testers needed in the TaaS model may be lesser than the traditional (non-cloud) model. In the non-cloud model, we can have large suites of tests that take a long time to execute and consume significant hardware resources which may block multiple parallel runs. On the cloud, given the ability to auto scale and spawn systems on demand, it is possible to parallelize execution of tests across multiple different topologies/configurations.
TaaS can handle various categories/types of testing. Here are the more popular ones -
What is TaaS?
TaaS leverages the cloud to offer scalable testing services to clients on an as-needed/on-demand basis. The goal is to offer highly accessible and available testing services at lesser cost. Test tools reside and test execution occurs on the cloud. Interfaces to access this service are provided e.g. via a web service, web app, etc. Normally, when talking of TaaS people think that only automated tests would be supported. However, TaaS involves the following models - all automated testing, manual (human run) or a hybrid model. Manual testing would be similar to an outsourced testing model which most of you may be familiar with.
Why move to TaaS?
Increasing costs - human resources, Labs & equipment - hardware/software, challenges with handling larger and complex products, several different types of testing to be performed, etc. As software gets more complex, inter-dependencies increase, support matrices multiply and the overall costs & complexity associated with testing keep rising.
TaaS offers to reduce hardware costs associated with maintaining labs in-house with elastic virtualized resources on the cloud at a much lower price point. Additionally, the number of testers needed in the TaaS model may be lesser than the traditional (non-cloud) model. In the non-cloud model, we can have large suites of tests that take a long time to execute and consume significant hardware resources which may block multiple parallel runs. On the cloud, given the ability to auto scale and spawn systems on demand, it is possible to parallelize execution of tests across multiple different topologies/configurations.
What can TaaS do?
TaaS can handle various categories/types of testing. Here are the more popular ones -
- Standalone product testing - upload a product/application and the test service runs a set of pre-defined checks and reports back on tests run and issues observed ranked by severity. More suited to small and some medium size apps
- Continuous Testing - checkout latest code from a repository, build, deploy, run a defined set of tests and report results back to enable Developers to improve their code/fix issues
- Application certification - offers more flexibility in determining what to test and provides a certification report. Useful to run against release/milestone drops of an application
- Load/Stress/Performance testing - an advantage with TaaS is the ability to quickly and often seamlessly scale on demand, mimic real world usage easily - perform cross-geo deployments and test, offer the necessary bandwidth and resources as needed
- Functional testing, localization (l10n) and i18n, Security testing, Unit testing, etc.
Benefits of TaaS
- Efficient use of test infrastructure and tools - with TaaS you normally pay only for what you use unlike a traditional model where you have a significant outlay of investment for setting up the infrastructure, obtaining dedicated tools, getting resources, etc. TaaS payment models are generally of the type - pay-as-you-go or pay-per-unit
- TaaS offers a scalable cloud based environment - unlike the traditional model where you are limited by the amount of hardware and platforms you have on site, with TaaS you can virtually scale up and down to the necessary extent based on your needs
- Related to the above point - the benefit of being able to scale in a TaaS model allows you to run really large tests and simulations
- With TaaS, you can share test tools and computing resources. Moreover, these tools and resources can be obtained when you need them - on-demand.
- Potential savings in costs with TaaS - operational, maintenance, etc.
- Potential for reduction in test times in a TaaS model which may help speed up releases
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