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Application Testing will Move to the Cloud

Contributed Article by Charley Rich, VP of Product Management and Marketing, Nastel

There is an argument to be made that a considerable economic advantage can be acquired by moving preproduction application testing to the cloud. We all know that the application lifecycle cost can be reduced significantly by more effective testing; especially, since the earlier a defect is found, the less expensive its resolution will be. But the challenge lies in the complexity of application deployments.   And without adequate testing of this complexity, the end result will inevitably be failures in production due to untested configurations. 

There are so many variables such as operating system releases and its patches, application server/web server/middleware releases and their patches, security, load balancers, databases, network and well, the list never ends.  Even the largest companies in the world can find it cost prohibitive to test every permutation as each requires non-trivial capital expenditures. However, if we could outsource the infrastructure for testing to a virtual testing lab in the cloud, time and cost can be greatly reduced at the same time greater application stability is achieved. 

One of the biggest bottlenecks companies face in testing is purchasing the needed infrastructure software and hardware and then configuring them appropriately. What makes this more difficult is myriad ways these components can be configured and each must be tested to avoid nasty surprises. Once a configuration is tested, the next variation in hardware and software must be configured and run through the test suite. The expense of acquiring and configuring all of this is significant and prevents a lot of comprehensive testing from occurring.

By using a cloud infrastructure, companies can avoid incurring the cost of the capital expenditures for all of the infrastructure and can focus on testing a far greater range of configurations and thus, produce more stable applications. 

In 2012, we'll see more companies begin to use cloud service providers to provide an infrastructure as a service or a platform as a service (also referred to as IaaS and PaaS) for testing - these services can provide the entire hardware, software, patches and various configurations necessary to give the testers the ability to focus on testing the applications. This change in approach enables businesses to move expenditures for testing from capital to operational and at the same time they deliver more robust solutions to their customers.

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About the Author

Charley Rich, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at Nastel, is a software product management professional who brings over 20 years of experience working with large-scale customers to meet their application and systems management requirements. Earlier in his career he held positions in Worldwide Product Management at IBM, as Director of Product Management at EMC/SMARTS, and Vice President of Field Marketing for eCommerce firm InterWorld. Charley is a sought after speaker and a published author with a patent in the application management field.