What Is Cloud-Based Test Automation? A Detailed View

Cloud services are like bringing everyone to the same ground, providing them with the same kind of infrastructure, and enabling them to equally contribute to the overall growth of technology. It works on the very basic foundation that someone having a great technical infrastructure lends to others for putting to good use.

Technology is evolving every moment and to keep up with its pace, you must keep upgrading your infrastructure or better to say tech setup every moment. But, it is not always possible for everyone to spend huge chunks of money again and again. That’s where cloud services save you.

Suppose you own an early-stage startup and are trying to build your dream product. Now, to make your product up-to-date, compatible with the latest technologies, and most importantly, to maintain ease while developing it, you definitely need to use the latest high-end development tools and setups. And, being at an early stage of the business, you are most likely to have very less funds to spend. What can be the potential solution for your issue?

Now, if some large organization has the high-performing setup that you need. They have some extra ones that they do not always need and can lend you against an easily affordable charge, it can be a win-win situation for both of you. You will get to use the necessary tools and high-end setups without spending a lot of money, and the lender organization will make a good income from their extra investment in those setups.

This theory is the same behind cloud-based test automation. So, let’s check it out in detail.

What Is Cloud-Based Test Automation?

Cloud-based test automation is the process of using cloud computing environments for testing software applications as well as their features to ensure that they are completing their objective. This method significantly increases the efficiency of the quality assurance process by allowing the testing team to use high-performance infrastructure for their work.

You already know how inefficient and time-consuming it was to manually test every bit of your product. For example, manual regression testing will take ages for larger products as after every small change in the code or every pull request by developers, you will have to verify that everything is working perfectly. Test automation made the world reduce its workload but the requirement for high-end setups was still an issue.

That’s where cloud-based test automation comes into the picture. It allowed every QA team to use high-performance infrastructure without investing a lot of money in that. Hence, with cloud-based test automation, you can use the top-notch environment of your choice in exchange for a very nominal charge, and that way, you become able to utilize your time, money, and energy on other projects.

This is one of the most favorite strategies in agile methodologies. DevOps teams who strive to maintain a stable CI/CD pipeline, have to continuously push updates to the codebase. In such a case, using cloud computing infrastructure levies the worry about staying stuck with slow, low-end systems. Similarly, using cloud-based test automation can remarkably help them to maintain a fast test suite as well as a balanced CI/CD pipeline.

Benefits of Cloud-Based Test Automation

You may have already got the idea that cloud-based test automation is a significantly advantageous practice. Now, let’s check out its benefits in detail.

Reduced QA Costs and Higher Time Savings

Both cost and time go hand-in-hand because these two are the most important resources that you utilize in the overall development and testing process. And, using cloud services for test automation can help you make huge savings in both of these resources.

You can easily calculate how much money you would have to spend if you need to buy everything to build the high-end infrastructure that you are getting against a minimal charge in cloud computing. It enables you to use top-notch setups and you can even save a lot of money that you can use in other projects.

The savings are similar in the case of time. Primarily, as automated test scripts take care of all the testing needs, you don’t need to manually test everything, and using high-performance setups through cloud computing makes it possible to run numerous test scripts in significantly less time. Hence, you get additional time to focus on more development projects.

Parallel Test Execution

Well, you must have surely read a lot about parallel testing in most of our articles. It is the practice of running multiple tests parallelly. Let’s know about it elaborately.

You are building a tech product, and it is quite certain that people are not going to use it in a single type of device. There are numerous laptops, mobile phones, tablets, desktop computers, etc. available in the market with different screen sizes. Hence, you must make sure that your application looks and performs properly on every set of devices.

For that, you need to perform rigorous tests on your application for all potential forms of devices that your users may use. Now, there can be numerous combinations of devices, browsers, and operating systems to test your application for, and it will be absolutely inefficient to perform such a huge number of tests in a single stream manner.

Hence, it is a great idea to parallelly perform multiple tests at once. It will save you huge amounts of time and resources. Cloud-based test automation plays an important role in providing you with a great parallel testing environment.

Easy parallel testing is one of the prime reasons why people like to use the advanced AI-based test automation tool PreFlight. It provides you with a truly amazing parallel testing experience.

Scaling With Ease

Scalability is a vital point in business. Having a goal for success, you will never want to stay stuck at the same level forever. And, that’s where you need to scale your business.

As we previously mentioned, the number of tech users is increasing rapidly, and companies are bringing out different strategies to cope with that enormous demand.

Now, as a software application developer, scaling your business means you have to fulfill the demands of the exponentially growing number of users, and the basic step to achieve that is rigorously testing every bit of your products and ensuring that their features are working properly.

While automating the tests lets you achieve higher test coverage, cloud-based test automation makes it even easier to upgrade your testing infrastructure within seconds. Hence, no matter how much your user base increases, you can get the necessary testing infrastructure in no time.

Your Location Does Not Matter

This was kind of a fictional statement a few years ago. Really, nobody had rarely thought that so many huge applications with numerous users using them every moment can be developed, launched, and maintained virtually without investing huge chunks of money in setting up offices and kind of forcing everyone to be physically present there.

The rise of cloud computing, and especially, the COVID-19 pandemic made everyone realize that tech products can easily be built, launched, and maintained while responsible team members can work from anywhere in the world. Due to the blessings of cloud computing, you can easily use your designed servers, infrastructure, and everything else from your home.

Being a completely remote, successful test automation company, Preflight is proud to say that all our team members work seamlessly from their respective homes without any hassle and we have been evidently capable of maintaining our top-notch infrastructure and serving the best to our users.

Geo-location Testing

Geo-location testing is a supremely important thing for any software application developed by a global company. If you are developing an application that will be available outside your region or country, geo-location testing is something that you must take care of.

There are a few crucial reasons behind such immense importance of geo-location testing, but the two most important ones among them are -

  • Your application is being launched in a different region that has different user behavior and requirements. So, you must verify that it satisfies those conditions.
  • Different regions or countries have different regulations or guidelines, and your app must be tested to ensure that those guidelines are properly met.

Now, if you try to test your app traditionally in a different country, you mostly need to hire a proper testing team and get a compatible test setup there. That will clearly be extremely difficult and expensive so, you must go with its smartest alternative.

Cloud-based testing allows you to test your app anywhere with any setup you want. So, if you are still not using it, get started with an advanced test automation tool like Preflight now.

Better Focus On The CI/CD Pipeline

The foundation of putting so much effort into cloud-based testing is getting rid of the headache of setting up the latest infrastructure all the time. And, you must know how many things need to be organized for maintaining a development and testing environment.

If you are always worried about arranging the latest high-performance tools, different language-compatible features, editors, CI/CD integrations, etc., you will burn all your time, energy, and money into it. That’s why you need to use cloud computing services and focus only on the innovation and service side of new projects.

Also, in the traditional waterfall model and with absolute dependence on physical tools, the workflow of different teams would flow in one directional stream and no one would be able to move without having the previous person complete his/her job.

On the other hand, cloud services enable everyone to collaborate in real-time and keep up performing their roles in the project. Similarly, with cloud-based test automation, every member of your team can work collaboratively and maintain an extremely balanced CI/CD pipeline with the help of each other.

Faster Time-to-Market

Now, it is some kind of a consequence of all the benefits that you just went through. It is evident that if you do not have to put a lot of effort, time, and resources into getting the latest test setups, and you get easy access to the most high-performance infrastructure that allows your entire team to work collaboratively in real-time, you will definitely be ready to launch your application within a much shorter time than it previously was.

Hence, automating your tests with a highly efficient tool like Preflight will make your testing process just a matter of seconds, and you will set new records for the fastest time-to-market.

Conclusion

Automating your software development and testing process without buying and setting up high-end devices and offices is no more a fictional thing. Cloud-based test automation is another pillar of that strong foundation.

This article tells you a lot about it so that you can become a true fan of this amazing technology, and start experiencing its capabilities. We must say it will unimaginably improve your overall experience of a tech business.

Now, you must know which tools are the strongest users of the awesome cloud-based test automation technology. We will surely bring out a detailed article about it soon.

However, we must mention that Preflight is one of the finest no-code test automation tools that can fulfill all your testing needs within seconds, and let every member of your team work collaboratively on the testing suites irrespective of their coding knowledge. And, to experience the same, you just need to sign up with us!

To know more about our products and services, feel free to reach out to us anytime or visit our website. Also, if you love to read informative tech articles, do not forget to check out our blog page.