7 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Automation Testing on Cloud

Software testing serves as a pivotal procedure to enhance the quality and performance of software applications. Among diverse testing methodologies, cloud-based automated testing emerges as a standout choice. This article delves into the realm of cloud-centric automated testing, shedding light on its advantages while also addressing prevalent errors encountered by testing teams.

Understanding Cloud-Driven Automation Testing

Cloud-based automation testing entails software developers harnessing cloud computing environments to assess their software applications. This strategy furnishes the QA team with access to an array of authentic devices hosted on the cloud, resulting in heightened productivity and efficacy. Your software development teams can do this on the cloud by creating test environments as needed, allowing them to continuously create, test, and distribute digital products without worrying about setting up new infrastructure every time they perform automation tests.

Gaining from Cloud Benefits in Automation Testing

• Cost-Efficient Approach: Embracing cloud-based automated testing translates to noteworthy cost savings. The necessity of erecting infrastructure from scratch diminishes, alongside reduced maintenance and update-related expenses. Service providers oversee infrastructure configurations, thereby curtailing costs associated with human revisions. Additionally, leveraging cloud resources facilitates personalized resource allocation, ensuring expenses align with resource consumption.
• Resilient Disaster Recovery: Cloud-powered automation testing ensures robust tracking and recovery mechanisms for software alterations. The cloud’s capacity to house extensive testing datasets proves invaluable during adverse scenarios. The absence of physical devices and infrastructure in cloud-based testing renders concerns like power interruptions, hardware impairment, and network glitches obsolete.
• Scalability Advantage: Conventional automation testing using physical devices comes with inherent limitations. Cloud-based automation testing offers the advantage of resource scalability during testing procedures. Resources can be allocated and reallocated as per requirement, optimizing software performance and preserving resources for future endeavors.
• Enhanced Team Collaboration and Support: Geographical barriers often impede effective team collaboration. Cloud resources empower remote access to real device testing, enabling team members to contribute irrespective of their location. Testing team constituents can seamlessly access testing information, outcomes, cases, and updates from any remote setting.

Running automated browser tests locally is suitable if your focus is limited to a handful of browsers. However, the challenge arises when extensive testing across various browser combinations is required. The solution to this is the use of a cloud-based platform like LambdaTest to perform automation testing. You can dramatically expand your browser coverage by executing your Selenium automation testing scripts within a cloud environment boasting over 3000 diverse desktop and mobile configurations. Assure a seamless user experience across a spectrum of devices.

• Execute Selenium Tests in Parallel: Unleash the power of a dependable, scalable, secure, and high-performing test execution cloud that empowers development and testing teams to accelerate their release cycles. Embrace parallel testing and significantly reduce test execution time by over 10 times.
• Real-Time Debugging with LambdaTest Test Analytics: Liberate yourself from external reporting dependencies. Access comprehensive artifacts and receive intricate failure reports to pinpoint precisely where issues occurred. With step-by-step drill-down capabilities, swiftly resolve challenges. Sharing detailed reports within your team is effortless, saving substantial time and resources.
• Effortless Debugging with Hawkeye Insights: Efficiently analyze meticulous Selenium testing logs for on-the-fly debugging. Delve into exception logs, command logs, network logs, raw Selenium logs, and a comprehensive video log that mirrors end-to-end test execution.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Automation Testing on Cloud

There are various guidelines and protocols that are followed by the testing team to ensure a good software testing process. Still, there are chances of some common mistakes. Given below are the most common 7 mistakes that are seen in the process of software testing on cloud platforms like LambdaTest. 

Ignoring Compatibility

As a tester, it is very important to understand the compatibility of the cloud-based tools and your software application that needs to get under automation testing on the cloud. Because this plays a very crucial role in the successful execution of automated testing on the cloud. If the compatibility of the software application is not matched according to the automation testing tools, the testing script will not interact with the cloud-based testing tools as it should. 

Hence, it will degrade the testing performance, and there are chances that the testing may fail because the limitations and capabilities of the virtual environment may be different from those of local testing setups.

Inadequate Test Coverage

Performing the testing process for limited and popular devices and browsers is not advised. It will lead to minimizing the testing scope, and you will not be able to make your software application extensively compatible and efficient. As a software company, you can not restrict the users to use a limited range of devices or operating systems. So, in cloud-based automation testing, you increase this limitation of the testing boundary. 

You can simulate your software application for a wide range of devices and types of operating systems. Performing automation testing on the cloud using a huge number of virtual devices helps to uncover minor issues and bugs related to compatibility. 

Insufficient Testing Inputs

Using the cloud for automation testing helps to provide you with numerous test validations for Laas, PaaS, and Saas. Using enough testing inputs is a very important step in automated testing on a cloud of software for software testing. Test engineers frequently commit the error of not fully validating a scenario. When examined at the user interface (UI) level, for instance, a functionality can seem to be operating without any issues. But there may be errors in the background or at the database level, which might not ensure the expected data integrity and might cause significant system problems. So, always remember to use the cloud resources and tools to provide enough testing inputs or test cases to the automation testing process on the cloud. 

CI/CD Pipeline Ignorance

Integrating CI/CD pipeline into your software testing process is a must-step in automation testing using the cloud. As you know, the CI/CD pipeline works as a central repository that is used to reflect any change in your software source code. All the team members can see and modify the changes in the software application before making them live. In automation testing on the cloud, if CI/CD pipeline is not integrated, it will lead to non-transparency. When you use cloud-based automation testing, it must be associated with the CI/CD pipeline so that all testing team members can see and provide their contribution to the project. 

Unrecognized Priorities

Unrecognized priorities in the field of automation testing on the cloud are defined as the ignorance of automating the components using cloud tools with less priority and leaving the important features and components unaddressed for automation on the cloud. It may lead to an unorganized use of the tools and a waste of cloud resources. The major part of cloud resources gets utilized on simple and easy components, and the complex part is left as it is. 

There should be a good analysis of setting the priority of components concerning the software application that need to be automated on the cloud. Otherwise, it may lead to poor testing efficiency, and it will also take more time to execute the automation testing on the cloud. 

Apart from these negative parts, it will also not meet the client’s requirements. To prevent this mistake, the testing team must maintain good communication with the client. They will help to understand the priorities and important factors of the software application so that the testing team can set priorities accordingly in the automation testing on the cloud. 

Lack of Monitoring

Generally, it is considered that there is no human intervention required for the monitoring of automation testing on the cloud. But it’s not true; there are still human monitoring and control needs to perform automation testing with efficiency on the cloud. Ignoring the various activities during the automation testing on the cloud may lead to unwanted issues and errors, and it may fail the whole testing process. 

You need to use advanced and featureful monitoring tools so that all the activities, such as resource usage, task metrics, etc., can be monitored. It will help you to keep an eye on the testing process, and you can detect and fix any errors while performing automation testing on the cloud.

Unoptimized Parallel Testing

Performing automation testing on the cloud by using the concept of parallel testing makes your testing process much faster. But if you do not optimize the testing processes with the available resources over the cloud, there will be an overloading issue and it will degrade the testing speed and performance. So, you just need to make the correct optimization for your testing processes to run into parallel test execution over the cloud. There should be balance and ordination between the available resources and tasks that need to get under parallel execution in automation testing on the cloud.

For example, if you want to run a test case that will take about 10 minutes to execute in parallel, it would only take 10 minutes to complete the task of testing a combination of 10 different types of web browsers and devices. So, using the concept of parallel testing in automation testing on the cloud helps to test the browser on a large number of web browsers. Also, it helps to run multiple test cases parallel on different browsers available on the cloud in very little time. 

This saves a lot of time and the testing scope increases in this scenario. You can utilize those times in some other productive work of the organization. These are some of the common mistakes that the testing team must be aware of while performing automation testing on the cloud.

Conclusion

Software testing is the process that is done to improve software efficiency and to check and fix any kind of error that may degrade the software quality. You can perform these tests by two methods that are manual testing and automated testing. Using automated testing has many advantages, as it is scalable, cheap, improves the testing process, requires less human intervention, and many more. Apart from the benefits, there are some common mistakes that the testing team makes that reduce the testing efficiency that we have discussed in this article. Hope you understand and will follow these steps to avoid any mistakes while performing automated testing on a cloud.