An effective testing infrastructure recognizes that the cost of defect caught post-release is exponentially more expensive than a defect caught pre-release. It detects and corrects defects before the product is ever released to your customer. An efficient testing infrastructure optimizes the cost-risk equation, minimizing the cost for testing activities while maximizing the probability that your product will meet or exceed your customers’ requirements.

Arguably, many companies do have reasonable functional testing capability. However, they seriously lack the regression, automation and performance testing capabilities that could greatly improve the quality of their product in the eyes of their customers. Why? There is constant pressure to invest scarce resources to deliver more and more features to stay ahead of the competition. AND, this typically happens at the expense of testing. Test automation and performance testing are activities that companies always seem to plan, but never actually get the resources and time to perform thoroughly.

Does your company have skills and bandwidth to perform these tests? If you are like most other companies these days and have leaned your workforce to the bone, chances are that you must focus your limited resources on introducing features to stay ahead of competition.

How then do these mission-critical testing activities get done?

There are options, of course.  You could build the capability in house. BUT you may end up needing more resources and time than you have to build a team, define effective and efficient processes, and establish the purpose-built infrastructure.  For a lot of companies, hiring people and investing capital in areas that are perceived to be outside the core, revenue generating activities of the company is simply not an option. 

You could outsource testing to a generalist IT service provider, BUT this testing is really a specialized activity and you could find yourself with exactly the same quality, management, and cost issues you had to start with. 

A better option may be to leverage new breed of specialist testing service providers that already have people, processes, and technology infrastructure that is purpose-built for this type of testing.  In essence, you plug into an optimized highly effective, highly efficient testing cloud. Risks are reduced, costs are controlled, and results are predictable. Problem Solved.

Of course, there are challenges, both real and perceived.  Business leaders worry about mission critical things like cloud security, vendor locking, cloud performance, and availability. In order to protect their businesses, businesses should, and likely will, undertake a lot of due diligence before selecting a Cloud vendor.  And even that is not enough … For cloud to be effectively deployed and deliver real business upside, cloud applications MUST be thoroughly tested before release to customers, internal or external. 

Cloud testing / SaaS testing is not same as in-house application testing. Cloud applications introduce many new challenges and traditional testing skills, methodologies, and tools are just not sufficient.  At the same time, testing is more important than ever as frequent issues may, at best, result into customer flight and loss of revenue.   At worst, a loss of customer data or violating customer information confidentiality may result in lawsuits that could devastate the business.

While there is a clear and compelling business case for Cloud computing, there are significant risks including performance, security, and availability.  To assure that cloud delivers on it value proposition, it is critical that you address:

• Confidentiality: You must ensure that strict security measures are in place in your cloud application. Only authorized users are able to access information that is relevant to them. You must thoroughly test the security of your applications to preserve confidentiality of your customers’ data.
• Resource Sharing (multi-tenancy): Cloud allows elasticity (e.g. resources are available on demand for your changing needs). If a proper resource quota is not in place, some applications can consume significant resources and negatively impact other applications. Your cloud environment where your application is deployed, should assure that enough resources are reserved for varying load, and that consumption of resources by one application cannot negatively impact other applications. Each application / customer must have a strictly enforced quota to ensure smooth delivery of all applications.  You must thoroughly test availability and quota boundaries for cloud applications. 
• Performance:  As your customers access your cloud applications over the internet, loads will inevitably vary based on things like the number of customers, how many are logged in at give time, and how extensive the operations they are performing. You must thoroughly test performance to understand behavior with varying loads, identify when you need to increase resources, and limit certain operations during peak usages. 
• Availability:  Resource sharing and dependence on internet infrastructure can caused availability issues for many cloud applications. You must perform exhaustive load stress tests with resource utilizations metrics and soak tests to assure that your application does not have availability issues.

To deliver real value to the business, proper steps must be taken before revenue-generating and/or business critical applications are migrated to cloud. Testing is clearly of critical importance. Without proper testing, migrating services to cloud may, and likely will, negatively impact your business, from disruptions that are merely nuisances to customer data confidentiality issues that could land your business in court.  The stakes are definitely high and mistakes could be costly. Today, social media will ensure that failures with your cloud infrastructures will be front and center with future prospects and customers. 

To complicate matters, cloud testing requires specialized capability. There are few organizations that have the skills, methodologies, and tools to effectively test cloud applications. The better approach may be to partner with a company that specializes in testing cloud applications.  Beyond the risk management and cost saving aspects, you may be enhancing your marketing message by highlighting the steps you have taken to address concerns around things like data security, vendor locking, performance, and availability.

Cloud computing looks to be an unprecedented opportunity, and not just another fad. But, you must be willing to take the steps required to assure that its potential is fully realized, while at the same time addressing real risks like security, performance, and availability.  A well thought out testing strategy and plan is one critical component that cannot be overlooked.