Testing as a service (Taas)

February 20, 2017

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In today’s world, the growth of technical and functional abilities of software and applications has made testing inevitable and extremely necessary. Moreover, the ever evolving software industry and its demand of technologically complex software with exceptional quality, functionality, scalability and more has further made testing a crucial stage in Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). During its early years, testing was just a fragmented single process performed internally using the existing infrastructure or by outsourcing to a dedicated service provider. However, over time testing has gone through a major evolution and change, from ad-hoc practices to test consulting and simple execution, it has gradually shifted to Managed Testing Model, which comprises of standardised test processes and infrastructure within an established Test Centre of Excellence.

However, in recent years the surging cost, high security environment and software sourcing variability has made the software testing function challenging and complicated for software engineers. In such a situation, it has therefore become quite necessary to assess and implement the right methodologies to achieve scale, minimize cost and to offer improved services. Testing as a Service is considered to be the most appropriate and viable testing model by many organisations to achieve these desired goals and results. It is an outsourcing model, in which the testing activities are outsourced to the third party that specializes in stimulating real world testing environments as per client’s requirements.

Defining Testing as a Service (TaaS):

Abbreviated as TaaS, Testing as a Service is the latest evolution in the software testing space, which is rapidly gaining traction in the market as a cloud-based delivery model. TaaS is considered as a viable testing model in the agile development and DevOps approaches since it helps achieve business objectives and innovation with the desired speed. TaaS model works as a unit-based testing in a virtual environment. TaaS is considered extremely important and effective method of testing, as it helps organisations in achieving reduced testing cost and improves service for their IT requirements. TaaS does this by outsourcing testing activities associated with some of the company’s business activities to a service provider rather than using their own employs as well as resources. TaaS may involve engaging consultants to help and advice employees or simply outsourcing an area of testing to a service provider. By adapting this method of testing, organisations not only prevent excessive investment, which reduces their testing cost, but also enjoy the benefit of decreased risk.

Types of Testing as a Service (TaaS):

Testing as a Service (TaaS) plays an immensely important role in testing the quality, functionality, scalability and other significant features of a software. It is a testing model that is used for testing application that requires extensive automation and short test execution cycle as well as for ad-hoc or irregular testing activities that require extensive resources. Also, when testing tasks that do not require in-depth knowledge of the design or the system are performed, TaaS is used by testers. Moreover, there are various types of TaaS that help individual in the process of testing. These types of Testing as a Service are as follows:

1. Functional Testing as a Service: These include UI/GUI testing, regression, integration, and automated User Acceptance Testing (UAT), but not necessarily to be part of functional testing.
2. Performance Testing as a Service: When multiple users accessing the application at the same time, TaaS mimics as a real world user environment by creating virtual users and performing the load as well as stress testing.
3. Security Testing as a Service: Another benefit of using TaaS is that it helps in providing more automated testing services.

Why Testing as a Service (TaaS)?

Testing as a Service (TaaS) is a self-service portal for running applications for functional and load testing. It tests library with full security control that saves all the test assets available to end users. Additionally, to maximize the hardware utilization, sharing of Cloud hardware resource pool is facilitated while abiding the security policies. TaaS, in short, ensures the detection of bottlenecks and solves the problems for the application under test by continuously monitoring it. All these reasons makes TaaS immensely significant and hence it should be performed regularly by testers. Other reasons to perform TaaS are given below:

• Predictable and on-demand service, accessible, available without compromising the quality as well as the cost of testing the application.
• Flexible and scalable delivery model.
• Outcome based sourcing and pricing.
• Holistic automation
• With TaaS one can improve overall QA process and delivery framework.
• Enabling better estimation and budgeting.
• Eliminates the need for capital expenditure on infrastructure, software and human resources.

Benefits of Testing as a Service (TaaS):

The above discussion on TaaS proves that there are several benefits of using Testing as a Service. TaaS enables predictive delivery quality and cost. It is a process driven approach that is independent of people. Furthermore, it is an amalgamation of several elements like, test methodology, testing infrastructure for tools and applications, testing tools, accelerators and frameworks, among other things. Also, its metering capabilities allows tracking and charging of the services used by customers all over the world. Other benefits of testing as a Service (TaaS) are mentioned here:

1. Reduced costs: The major advantage of implementing TaaS model is that it reduces cost. Since the entire infrastructure is hosted on cloud, it does not require investment of setting up servers, tools and operating systems, which reduces the cost of the capital cost. Moreover, as the enterprises pay the for the actual service and time take, it helps in controlling cost which further results in better ROI.
2. Collaboration with Centralisation: It also promotes collaborations as the entire library and resources are hosted on a centralized cloud. This centralized environment delivers unified working, which eliminates duplication rework and issues.
3. Better Time-to-Market: In contrast to performing on premise testing, which can cause project delays and increase the cost of testing, cloud provides limitless and round the clock access to services, tools and programs from anywhere without any waiting as well as delay. This speeds up the entire testing process, which results in better time to market of applications.
4. Improved Scalability: TaaS environment allows testers to easily and quickly scale the application under test and expand the capacity threshold for thousands of users concurrently to suit agile and devOps demands.
5. Efficiency: TaaS model allows testers to focus on important process while synchronizing tools, people and process. Moreover, with standardised infrastructure there are less errors of inaccurate configurations, which ultimately attributes to drive efficiency in the entire test process.

Conclusion:

The world all-around is moving rapidly towards great advancement and is adapting new and improved technologies day by day. All this progress and improvement in the IT industry has increased the demand of software and applications that have exceptional functionality, performance, scalability and more. Therefore, to achieve these requirements and demands of the clients and the IT industry, testing is performed in all the stages of software development process. Furthermore, Testing as a Service (TaaS) is used by testers as well as organisations to achieve reduced costs and improved service for their IT test requirements. It is self-service portal for running applications for functional and load testing. Moreover, it ensures the detection of bottlenecks and solves the problems for the application under test by monitoring it regularly. With the assistance of Test as a Service (TaaS), one can perform testing tasks that do not require any in depth knowledge of the design as well as the system. Hence, by implementing Test as a Service (TaaS) organisations can get best results, while saving time as well as the cost of testing.