Recently, we at Oracle asked a group of testers what percentage of their testing time was spent on peripheral activities such as procuring hardware, deploying the application under test, deploying a test tool, finding/detecting/login issues/bugs and/or patching an application. Two-thirds of those testers indicated they spent 40% to 70% of their time on these peripheral activities.
When asked what the right solution could be to solve that enormous time consumption, the majority selected testing cloud solutions that combine capabilities for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Let's look at each one:
- IaaS-based testing cloud: This solution is typically based on provisioning of virtual machines on provided infrastructure. This will only resolve the provisioning of applications under test and test tools which is only 10-15% of the total solution.
- SaaS-based testing cloud: This is a software (for test automation) as a service solution. It only addresses the test execution and (possibly) issue/bottleneck identification. It does not offer provisioning for applications under test. In many cases, it does not offer monitoring of internal applications.
The brand new Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Testing as a Service (TaaS) solution offers that combination and helps software development and QA organizations to spend more time on actual testing and less on peripheral activities, while significantly enhancing testing efficiency and reducing the duration of testing projects.
Oracle's TaaS is a platform for delivering automated application testing services. It is a self-service solution designed for private clouds that orchestrates the testing process end-to-end by:
- Automating the provisioning of test labs including application under test and test tools.
- Executing load and/or functional test scripts against the application.
- Providing rich application monitoring and diagnostics data for analysis.
- Sophisticated chargeback facility for metering and charging the usage of the testing cloud by end users.
It's built with semantic an understanding of testing artifacts like testing tools, applications, test scripts, it is not just VMs.
This information and more was discussed in a recent webcast we presented in cooperation with the online StickyMinds.com community. We uploaded the replay on Youtube for you to watch at your convenience.
Happy testing!