Cloud Testing: Issues and Challenges

Over the past few years, Cloud has evolved as a buzz word in most of the IT industries. Testing in the cloud has greatly reduced the cost involved especially for mobile applications. Cloud manifests itself in three forms viz. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). However, Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service has recently emerged as the most important software testing services.

Jerry Gao, Xiaoying Bai and Wei- Tek Tsai in a white paper titled "Cloud Testing – Issues, Challenges, Needs and Practice" published in Software Engineering: An International Journal highlights the major issues and challenges in cloud testing.

1.    On – Demand Test Environment Construction
The question that often arises is how to build a testing environment for on- demand cloud testing services which is either systematic or automatic. According to Gao et al, the current cloud technology does not have any supporting solutions that will help cloud engineers build a cost effective cloud test environment.

2.    Scalability and Performance Testing
A survey by Gao and others found that many of the published papers have discussed about performance testing and solutions; however, they only "focus on scalability evaluation metrics and frameworks for parallel and distributed systems." The current metrics, frameworks and solutions, does not support the features such as dynamic scalability, cost – models and others.

3.    On – demand Testing Issues and Challenges
Software testing services in TaaS should be controlled and managed by keeping in mind the on demand testing requests and this raises many issues and challenges such as identifying the test process for TaaS which will support on-demand automated testing, or to identify the various approaches to help engineers cope with the breakdown of test cases or test scripts.

4.    Regresson Testing Issues and Challenges
Software challenges and bug fixing brings in regression testing issues and challenges. The on – demand cloud testing services should address the various issues and challenges.