When to Migrate Software Testing to the Cloud?

Abstract

Testing is a challenging activity for many software engineering projects, especially for large-scale systems. The amount of tests cases can range from a few hundred to several thousands, requiring significant computing resources and lengthy execution times. Cloud computing offers the potential to address both of these issues: it offers resources such as virtualized hardware, effectively unlimited storage, and software services that can aid in reducing the execution time of large test suites in a cost-effective manner. However, migrating to the cloud is not without cost, nor is it necessarily the best solution to all testing problems. This paper discusses when to migrate software testing to the cloud from two perspectives: the characteristics of an application under test, and the types of testing performed on the application.