Meeting today’s challenges for testing and application development for the Enterprise

For today’s global enterprise, custom application development and testing represents a large part of IT’s time and expense. The ability to update, refresh, or bring on line new
applications quickly is critical to the competitive advantage of the organization. For example, mobile applications to take advantage of the explosion of handheld and portable devices. Application testing in its various forms can be a gating factor in the efficient delivery of new application value to the business. As IT departments look to provide a rapid development environment, often testing struggles to keep up.

Factors that are impediments to efficient testing:

• Insufficient test infrastructure to handle surges in demand
• Strain on capital budgets to handle new projects, large scale requests, or new technologies
• Procurement approvals and set up of test environments are significant bottlenecks
• Test tool licenses are expensive and difficult to administer and manage
• Testing often done in silos without a standard process or shared operations
• Scheduling tests and resources is an in-exact science with lots of inefficiency, impacting product release
• Test personnel are frequently not aligned to the test environment, either from a domain or technical perspective

If your development and test processes are negatively impacting business, it’s time to
look into Testing-as-a-Service.

Cloud solutions are well suited to deliver efficiency and cost savings for application testing where flexibility and time-to-market are at a premium.

Key attributes of cloud-enabled testing :

• Highly scalable, on-demand infrastructure supports immediate capacity needs
• Rapid deployment of testing configurations—special tools and process allow you to build new test environments in a matter of hours on the public cloud rather than weeks
• Quickly decommission tests as needed—only pay for the actual time that you are testing
• Simulate large “real-life” scenarios such as giant server farms, without the CapEx exposure
• Apply various configurations of compute power to the test bed to match the needs and expected configurations of production deployments—for example the number of CPU cores and memory
• Pre-configured test “templates” can be instantly instantiated with the ability to run new tests on demand
• Licensing headaches can be off loaded to the service provider—pay a single fee for a bundle of testing related services
• Global reach—tests that would benefit from external or public access can be more easily accommodated through a public-based cloud testing framework