Testing in the cloud

The combinations of testing environments that we should take care of is growing every day, and, if we expect good test coverage, we should think about testing on the cloud by moving our testing infrastructure there.

What is testing on the cloud?

We have several possible environments combinations for each app, for instance, a web application should be tested on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge just to cover a few of the most common scenarios, but we should also test our application on all those browsers running on different operative systems.

On the other hand, if we want to test a mobile app, we should be testing it on iOS and Android, on different screen sizes, with different connectivity settings, etc.

This brings a new problem to the table, with new hardware and OS version releases, our test environment starts being uncontrollable, expensive, and unmanageable.

Many companies prefer to take the risk and just test on a few combinations, others are willing to go further, but don’t have the money to afford those environments.

This is when cloud providers come into the game, as they provide us with all the infrastructure that we need for a price, not cheap, but much cheaper than maintaining everything by ourselves.

Why testing in the cloud?

Moving your environments to the cloud will help your company to:

  • Save money on hardware
  • Save money on infra
  • Detect configuration issues easier
  • Detect bugs earlier
  • Detect responsive design issues faster
  • Reduce the time to market

Automated testing in the cloud

If your company has an automation testing approach, moving the environments to the cloud is the best option, let’s say that we have hundreds of selenium tests running on your infrastructure, and you need to execute them on iOS and Android.

If you need to support the latest 3 android and iOS versions, you will need to execute thousands of test cases every day, without the ability to run them in parallel.

Moving to a cloud provider will let you execute your test cases in parallel on all the devices that you want, for a fraction of the price that you are paying for executing those test cases locally.

What are mobile devices farms?

Mobile devices farms are datacenters hosting mobile devices (iOS and Android) that are accessible to the testers, so they can execute manual and automated tests.

mobile device farm

Which are the best testing cloud services?

We have several cloud providers that support different configurations for us, and that let us use the most common automation framework providing full compatibility with them.

Some of the best cloud providers are, in no particular order:

Saucelabs

Perfecto Mobile

Kobiton

Mobile Labs

AWS

Browserstack

Maestro Cloud

Bottom line

Testing in the cloud is something that will reduce your costs and will let you increase the test coverage to detect bugs earlier and to reduce the time to market. Having a local test infrastructure is something that you should not be doing because if you are, you are 20 years behind your competitors.

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