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13Regardless of what other practices you do, or advancesyour team is making to keep up with the new paradigms insoftware development, you cannot succeed without massiveautomation. As we know, old, high-maintenance, random,automation methods will not work today. Automatedregression tests are not only for speed, they are necessaryfor confidence, coverage, focus, information and to free usup to do more exploratory discovery. This last point is oftenlost in the new Agile development paradigms. With reduceddesign time and vague user stories, test teams need todiscover behaviors (intended or unintended), examine alternativepaths and explore new functionality. No one has thetime to do this without massive automation.We also know that scripted, old style automation does not work.I suggest you read Hans Buwalda’s article on Action basedTesting for the most advanced methods for test automation.The Cloud and SaaSThe CloudThe biggest impact of SaaS on test methods is the necessityand growing importance of performance, load, security,and scalability testing, in addition to having our hands fullwith functionality testing. Where load, performance andscalability testing have often been postponed due to themethod’s reputation of being expensive, slow, nice-to-have,optional, etc., there needs to be crucial discussion beforecompromising security testing.The value proposition behind SaaS is: let ―us‖ manage theservers, databases, updates, patches, installs and configuring.Everything your IT team used to do when you boughtsoftware, you can now buy as a service. Implicit in this proposalis - ―We‖ will manage and secure your data. The biggesthurdle most companies face in letting someone outsidethe company manage and maintain corporate intellectualproperty is data security. Security testing is not optional.In some cases, security testing is performed by specializedteams with their own tools. In most cases I see, thetest teams are integral to security testing in:Test case design.Data design.Stress points.Knowledge of common and extreme userscenarios.Reusing existing automation for security testing.VirtualizationThe primary impact of virtualization is the ability to dothings faster.Virtualization makes managing test environments significantlyeasier. Setting up the environments requires thesame amount of work, but regular re-use becomes significantlyeasier. Management and control of environmentsthrough virtualization is now a basic tester skill for:The common use of the cloud in software developmenttoday is virtualization of environments to quickly sharetools, resources and run simulations of both hardware andsoftware. This becomes more relevant in the context of thecurrent explosion in the mobile applications market forsmartphones and tablets. These applications require shorterdevelopment cycles and automated virtual regressionsmaking cloud testing cost-effective and efficient.SaaSSoftware-as-a-Service presents unique test method challengesthat are different from process changes with SaaS.A positive aspect of SaaS testing is the ability for teams tocontrol the production environment. There is no server sidecompatibility testing and even client-side access can berestricted and controlled.Executing tests on multiple virtual servers, clients,and configurations using multiple defined data setsincreases test coverage significantly.Reproducing user environments and bugs is easier.Easy tracking, snapshots and reproducibility to aidteam communication.Whatever resources are constrained, such as database,service or tools, your test automation andmanual execution can be virtualized for independent,faster, shared or not, independent execution.Facilitate faster regression testing economicallyusing many virtual machines.Virtualization frees-up your desktop.Performance bottlenecks and problems are common withvirtualization test projects. Automation may be more complexto set-up. Daily deployment of new builds to multiple (think100s) of VMs needs skill to run smoothly. To be effective,your team will probably need a virtualization or tool expert.W W W . L O G I G E A R M A G A Z I N E . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 3 ǀ V O L V I I ǀ I S S U E 1