Last Updated on March 21, 2023 by Larious

In today’s fast-paced software development world, meeting the time-to-market goals without compromising on the quality of the software application is a must. As a result, automated testing has become an integral part of the software development lifecycle. However, setting up and maintaining an automation testing infrastructure takes time and effort. 

By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, developers can focus on creating innovative features and delivering software applications faster. However, performing automation testing on local testing frameworks can be expensive and time-consuming. That’s where cloud testing comes in.

Cloud-based automation testing has emerged as a game-changer, offering numerous benefits to organizations of all sizes. Cloud-based testing environments offer a cost-effective and scalable solution for performing automation testing. By leveraging the power of the cloud, development teams can run tests on multiple devices and platforms simultaneously without worrying about infrastructure or maintenance costs. 

In this blog, we will discuss cloud-based automated testing and the top five benefits of performing automation testing on the cloud.

What is Cloud-Based Automation Testing?

According to GMinsights, automation testing on the cloud is valued at USD 20 billion, and between 2023 and 2032, it is predicted to exhibit over 15% CAGR. The rising penetration of technology will augment business growth.  

Cloud-based automation testing is a modern approach to software testing that leverages cloud infrastructure and resources to perform automated tests. Instead of relying on local hardware and software, cloud-based automation testing uses cloud services to execute tests on remote environments. 

This testing method offers numerous advantages over traditional testing, including improved scalability, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility. With cloud-based automation testing, development teams can easily spin up and tear down testing environments, run tests simultaneously, and collaborate with team members across locations. 

Moreover, cloud-based automation testing reduces the time and effort required to set up testing environments, enabling teams to focus on delivering high-quality software applications. Overall this approach improves testing efficiency, reduces costs, and ensures high-quality software delivery.

Attributes of Cloud-based Automation Testing

Cloud-based automation testing offers a wide range of features that make it an outstanding approach to software testing. Even though there are other testing options through tools and frameworks, a cloud-based platform is the most preferred among the developers and testers. Here are some crucial attributes of cloud-based automation testing: 

• Cloud-based automation testing allows scalability to the process. You can easily scale up or down the number of testing environments, devices, or servers being used based on the size and complexity of your tests. 
• It is easy to outweigh the upfront cost by leveraging the cloud. 
• It promotes collaboration with the team members as anyone can access the cloud and perform automation testing from any location. 
• You can use various tools and technologies like Jira with cloud-based testing. 
• The cloud can improve test coverage by allowing us to perform tests across multiple platforms and devices. 

5 Benefits of Performing Automation Testing on Cloud

The present era’s technological advancements have transformed how software testing is performed. Automation testing on cloud platforms has garnered attention due to its flexibility and cost-effectiveness, allowing organizations to enhance their software quality while reducing their operational costs. 

Let’s explore the benefits of performing automation testing on the cloud in detail. 

Keep Up With Platform Upgrades

With cloud-enabled automation testing, Quality assurance (QA) teams do not need to worry about software upgrades or maintaining hardware. As the cloud environment is constantly updated, the latest updates are automatically available, authorizing QA teams to stay up-to-date with the latest platform advancements. This assures that your tests are always running in the most reliable and secure environment. Additionally, with cloud-enabled automation testing, QA teams can easily scale up or down their environment according to the current test requirement. This allows them to optimize their resources and save costs in the long run. 

Hassle-Free Disaster Recovery

With cloud-enabled automated testing, software developers or testers can effortlessly move the entire test environment to the cloud for recovery in case of any natural disaster or unforeseen circumstances. This eradicates the need for IT teams to work on manual backups and disaster recovery plans. Additionally, cloud-enabled automated testing can help reduce recovery time and minimize data loss in case of any unfavorable event. 

Cloud-enabled automated testing is especially beneficial when the data is of a sensitive nature and ought to be recovered quickly. It also authorizes quick replication of software systems and testing platforms so that tests can be run with minimal disruption to the testing process. 

In addition, cloud automation testing also helps ensure that the data is securely stored and backed up, minimizing the chances of any data loss. Finally, it also helps to optimize the cost of test execution by allowing QA engineers to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness offered by the cloud.

Unlimited Test Automation Scalability

Cloud automation testing allows quality assurance engineers to scale up or down their tests easily. This makes running tests on multiple platforms with different configurations easy. This equips QA engineers to execute test batches in parallel and scale up or down in terms of the number of tests and combinations. This results in faster testing and better coverage of the application. The cloud can perform large-scale tests with massive data sets, otherwise impossible on a single machine. This scalability allows for even greater accuracy and robustness in automated tests. 

Cloud-based testing eradicates the need to maintain costly test environments and hardware devices to support all the tests. This remarkably reduces the costs and time associated with setting up and maintaining testing environments. Furthermore, cloud-based automated testing is more secure, as all the tests are stored in the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere without the need for physical hardware.

Finally, cloud-based automated testing reduces the time needed to run tests, increasing the testing process’s efficiency and effectiveness.

Enables DevOps

Automation testing on the cloud assists in bridging the gap between the DevOps and quality assurance teams. It allows DevOps teams to respond quickly to end-user feedback and identify and fix issues. This helps ensure that the customer experience is improved and the product is high quality. Cloud automation testing can also assist in diminishing the time it takes for the DevOps team to respond to end-user requests, authorizing them to respond more quickly and improve customer satisfaction. 

Automation testing on the cloud entitles teams to access the latest tools and technologies to increase collaboration and rev the software delivery. This enables organizations to swiftly and easily integrate DevOps practices into their existing Software Development Life Cycle and helps them to reduce delivery time and cost.

The cloud facilitates automation testing on a larger scale, enabling teams to identify issues and get feedback on product updates quickly. Additionally, automation testing on the cloud makes it easy to scale up or down depending on the need. This helps organizations to optimize their budget and resources when it comes to quality assurance. 

Parallel Test Executions

Parallel testing authorizes software testers to significantly reduce testing times and improve the coverage of tests. It allows them to divide tests into multiple parts that can be executed simultaneously, resulting in faster test cycles and improved test coverage. Besides reducing the time needed to execute tests, parallel testing also helps testers quickly find and debug errors and boost the efficiency of the automation process. 

Additionally, by utilizing parallel test execution, testers can increase their results’ exactness and speed up software defects’ identification and resolution. Thus improving the overall quality of the software application. 

Parallel testing can be utilized to evaluate the scalability and stability of the application. It can also be used to determine its robustness in the face of an influx of end-users or modifications to its underlying architecture. Parallel testing can also evaluate the software application’s resilience in front of unexpected environmental or system resource changes. Furthermore, parallel testing can pinpoint any potential bottlenecks in the application’s code and detect any errors or bugs that may arise under specific conditions. 

Reduced Maintenance Costs

With cloud-based automated testing, there is no necessity to maintain a separate environment for test automation as the cloud provider takes care of the maintenance. The cloud infrastructure oversees all the back-end tasks, such as server management, installation of updates, and other related activities. This helps in reducing operational costs, as well as the time is taken for maintenance. Moreover, as the cloud can deliver a much higher level of scalability, the expenditure associated with the scaling of the system is also diminished enormously.

Conclusion

Cloud-based automation testing offers myriad benefits that can help organizations to overcome challenges in testing their software applications. With improved scalability, accessibility, flexibility, and cost efficiency, cloud-based automation testing allows organizations to optimize their testing processes and deliver high-quality software applications. 

Additionally, it enables seamless collaboration across geographically dispersed teams and reduces the need for hardware resources and maintenance. As technology advances, incorporating cloud-based automation testing in your software development lifecycle can help you stay competitive and meet the ever-evolving demands of your customers. 

There are many cloud-based platforms available in the market for automation testing. One of the most used platforms is LambdaTest. 

LambdaTest is a cloud-based automated testing platform that offers a wide range of features to help streamline your testing process and improve your software quality. You can perform real-time and automated cross browser testing across farms of 3000+ browsers, devices, and OS. It also offers a highly scalable parallel testing to automate your several test cases simultaneously.  

It offers automated testing with frameworks like Selenium, Playwright, Appium, and more

Other reason why you should choose LambdaTest for cloud automation testing includes

• High Scalability
• High flexibility 
• High security 
• Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing
• Real-time Testing

Choose an online grid-like LambdaTest and then kick-start the testing activity.