TEaaS: Test Environment as a Service

TEaaS: Test Environment as a Service

19 November 2010 12:12
By Edward Bishop

Cloud has been the hottest topic in IT for some time now and Professional Tester is planning an issue on what it has to offer testers.

Many very good online web testing tools are well established: for example the validators (ie static analysers) at http://w3.org, test and defect management applications, online performance monitoring services and browser compatibility automated testing environments such as those offered by saucelabs.com

But there seems to be a lot less for those testing non-web products. A standout is testersdesk.com, ValueMinds’ successful test design and test data generation toolkit. HP’s testing products are already available as-a-service at http://portal.saas.hp.com, but other big vendors appear still to be planning their strategies for cloud delivery of their mainstream tools (if you know different, please tell us).

Online test environments are especially interesting. Perfectomobile.com offers access to and control of actual mobile handsets located physically around the world – a brilliant example of using new technology to solve a long-standing testing problem, that of testing applications on multiple devices connected to various carriers.

Mobile app testing has a strong business driver: the need to get apps accepted for distribution on closed platforms. But what about other sectors? Will servers, workstations and other infrastructure, real or virtual, soon also be made available to testers via the cloud? Big gains in test coverage and effectiveness could be obtained given a range of common, configurable, resettable and instrumentable manual test environments without the cost of building and managing them in-house.

If you are offering or using such a service please tell us about it.