Are you wondering what is SaaS Application Testing? Are you confused between different Cloud Testing approaches or simple looking for the Best SaaS App Testing Company? The SaaS model of application development is one of the most successful model in the cloud computing business today. According to Gartner, as many as over 95% of all the organizations will migrate to SaaS model of cloud computing in the next 2 years. However, any issues with your SaaS application can make your customers to look for a better product. This is where performing comprehensive SaaS Testing of Cloud-hosted Applications becomes so important. Let’s learn how to create SaaS Test Plans, how to identify SaaS App Testing Scenarios and how to generate effective Test Cases for Cloud Apps.
What is SaaS Testing? Challenges, Tools & SaaS App Testing Approach
Based on the method of delivery, there are 3 distinct types of cloud computing: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Among these 3 different types of cloud computing, SaaS is one of the most popular. SaaS (Software as a Service) is a type of cloud computing method that hosts software applications and products in the cloud. Thus SaaS applications need not be installed locally and they are available on demand for the internet users via an internet browser. In order to fulfill customer expectations and to ensure customer satisfaction, it is very important to deliver bug-free product via skilled SaaS App Testing.
How to Perform Quick but Thorough SaaS Application Testing?
The ensure smooth functioning of your SaaS product thorough SaaS testing needs to be conducted before the release. However, often there may not be enough time to perform comprehensive testing of your SaaS product before it goes to production. There are a few tricks and best practices to make sure that your QA team doesn’t miss anything critical during this process. Before we discuss those SaaS Testing Best Practices, let’s first know about the different SaaS Testing Types.
SaaS Testing Types
There are several key types of testing methodologies that must be followed for SaaS products in order to ensure that the main components of the SaaS (Apps, infrastructure, and the network) are functioning without any issues:
1. Functional testing
Functional testing of your SaaS product verifies that the application works how it’s supposed to. This type of testing is often carried out in a staging environment by performing manual tests according to previously defined test plans and considering the needs and requirements of the end user. Functional SaaS testing covers the following types of tests:
– Cross browser/device/platform compatibility testing to ensure app performance across supported browsers, devices and platforms.
– Regression testing for every major releases, minor updates, integrations, or data migrations.
– Automated functional and regression tests.
– Reliability testing to identify and fix areas of weakness and to reduce the number of failures post-deployment.
2. Performance testing
Performance is one of the most important requirements for a successful SaaS application. During this type of testing, the SaaS Testing team will evaluate the application’s ability to handle loads and find the optimum load at which the product can function without any lags or other such performance issues.
Performance testing also includes load, stress, and scalability testing. Similarly, failure and recovery testing are also important for SaaS testing. These tests check the application for disaster recovery after simulation of various crashes caused due to internal factors (e.g. failures when writing data in to the database) and external factors (e.g. internet connection drop-outs or power outages etc).
3. Compatibility testing
One of the clear advantages of cloud-hosted SaaS services is their ability to be accessible regardless of:
– Browsers (Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox)
– Platforms (PC, Mac)
– Operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android)
– Mobile devices (tablets, smartphones)
– Hardware and software versions
Testing the compatibility of a SaaS application with various hardware is the most difficult part and you may seek the client’s inputs in order to define the test coverage matrix.
Here are a few SasS Testing tips to help you short-list the hardware for running the tests:
– Refer to analytics report to find out user statistics. This will provide the most popular platforms and app versions among your end users.
– Your client might want their profile to be connected with new platforms that haven’t been found in user statistics yet.
– When different supported platforms use the same core, testing using the core of one of these platforms might be a good idea.
– Test using the different technologies used in the SaaS application (GPS ON vs OFF, Camera ON vs OFF, Wi-Fi ON vs OFF, VoLTE ON vs OFF, etc).
4. Infrastructure Security Testing
VAPT & Security testing examines the SaaS application’s vulnerability for typical web application security threats (HTTP headline insert, cross-site scripting or XSS, SQL injection, etc).
– Test the whether the network where the SaaS application is deployed is secure.
– Run possible vulnerability attacks and security threat scenarios.
– Test access privileges for various user roles (especially in a multi-tenant environment).
– Ensure the security, integrity, and availability of application data.
– Ensure compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS).
– Make sure that every security warnings, errors, and requests from unreliable sources are being logged.
5. API Integration Testing
The success of any SaaS application depends on the app’s ability to handle API requests. When a third-party application developer develops their own applications using your API it adds value to your own product. Hence, it’s important to test all API interfaces for reliability, safety, usability, and performance and accuracy of API documentation.
6. Maintenance Testing
Maintenance testing team is responsible for ensuring smooth performance of your SaaS application when in production. Maintenance testing is executed regularly to ensure correct performance of application, customer satisfaction, and error-free billing. Usually, the maintenance testing team can track and analyze problems in the following areas:
– Applications
– Services
– Application servers
– Platforms (operating systems)
– Databases
– Data-level logs
– Alerts
– Warnings
– Functionality and performance errors
Best Practices of Testing SaaS-based Applications
– Organizational best practices from other business units can help in identifying best practices for testing SaaS products and applications.
– The first step in this should be assessing your SaaS testing requirements.
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– Next, you must develop test plan and test suite depending on the requirements of your SaaS application.
– Don’t forget to perform load testing by increasing the number of concurrent users in order to ascertain the performance of the SaaS application under increased workload.
Best SaaS Testing Tools and Solutions
Quality at Speed is one of the most important factors for the success of any SaaS application. Hence, leveraging the power of test automation is important. Other than automated testing, there are also a number of SaaS testing tools that enable SaaS QA teams to speed up the overall SaaS testing process.
SaaS Testing Tools for Functional Testing
Functional testing is one of the major types of testing for any types of products. Functional testing of SaaS apps helps in confirming the compliance of the SaaS product with the functional requirements. There are many different types of functional testing tools that can be used for functional testing.
SaaS Testing Tools for Switching IP Addresses
In certain instances, SaaS application testers may need to use IP address switching services such as VPN services. This can be especially needed for SaaS products that are developed for a specific market in a certain country and may have some inbuilt IP-based limitations.
To bypass such SaaS limitations, SaaS testers can use the following VPN services:
– TunnelBear is a cross-platform, multi-country VPN client with great features. This VPN software needs to be installed and registered with an email address. With TunnelBear, SaaS testers can connect to local VPNs in up to 20 different countries. With TunnelBear you can simultaneously connect up to 5 devices. Excellent encryption, decent speeds, and minimal connection lags are some of the major benefits of Tunnelbear VPN. However, its free version provides only 500 MB of traffic per month.
– Hotspot Shield VPN Free Proxy. The free version of this VPN service contains some restrictions on the countries that you can select. However, Hotspot Shield VPN ensures highly secure connection by ensuring that all online transactions are passed through secure HTTPS protocol.
– If you need to use VPN services, you can also try Touch VPN, ZenMate VPN, Hoxx VPN Proxy, or Hola VPN.
– React developer tools — this is a special tool that works in Chrome. When working with React in the Chrome browser, you can use the React Developer Tools extension, which can be found here. SaaS testers can use this extension when they need to enter data in the UI that isn’t supported by the field format. To inspect sites that use React and view their components, do the following:
– Open the site in Google Chrome.
– Go to the Additional Tools tab and click on Developer Tools.
– Find the React tab, which contains all information about the components used.
API Integration Testing
The success of your SaaS solution also will depend on your application’s ability to allow and handle third-party API requests. That’s why, testing all API end-points for their functionality, security, usability, performance, and technical requirements is very important for making your SaaS application successful.
The following API testing tools can help you to test API request and API response codes for third-party system requests by comparing the received data from the API with the data in the UI:
– Advanced Rest API — This API testing tool helps with testing Rest APIs and services by sending custom HTTP/HTTPS requests.
– Postman — This is a popular HTTP client for API testing. You can quickly create requests with required HTTP methods and parameters, send the requests, and check the results using this tool.
– Requestly — This Chrome client plugin modifies HTTP requests to help with API testing.
Using these API testing tools and extensions, you can easily compose and even edit simple or complex HTTP requests. Those compiled API requests are then saved automatically for future testing. API responses from the server can also be saved locally on the hard disk. Also, the history of past HTTP requests can be saved by category (or project).
Tools for Generating Random Test Data
If you need to generate a large volume of fake test data, for instance random addresses, first and last names, or ZIP codes for testing the SaaS application, you can use Fake Address Generator. This website provides fake random addresses (with street, city, state, etc.), basic information (name, gender, birthday), phone numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, and even fake online profiles that you can use for testing.
SaaS Testing Tools for Non-functional Testing
Unlike functional SaaS testing, which is performed to verify that the SaaS product meets original functional requirements, non-functional testing are performed to ensure compliance with non-functional aspects of requirements:
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– User experience (how easy it is for the end users to use your SaaS application)
– Application Security (encryption of user data, protection of application data, prevention of hacking)
– Application performance at different loads
SaaS Testing Tools for Load Testing & Performance Testing
There are a number of popular load and performance testing tools such as JMeter, Gatling, and Tsung that you can use for SaaS Testing. These applications are designed to perform load testing of functionality and to measure performance of your application under stressful conditions. Although these tools are quite easy to use, it may take some experience for the performance testers to accurately analyze the results and arrive at conclusions. CredibleSoft’s SaaS testing team has plenty of experience using tools like JMeter.
Using JMeter, you can determine the maximum number of simultaneous users that a SaaS website can support. JMeter is capable of simulating high system load. Using JMeter, you can easily create and then duplicate samples of user actions and launch them in separate threads. JMeter provides a wide number of options for analyzing performance reports.
UI Testing Tools
At the UI testing stage of SaaS app testing, testers need to check whether it‘s easy to use the application interface and whether it follows the approved prototype. For UI testing of SaaS apps the following tools can be used:
Chrome DevTools comes embedded in the Google Chrome browser. It can be launched by going to Settings (icon in the upper right corner) –> More tools –> Developer tools. The Chrome DevTools can be very useful for debugging purpose. They can help you edit pages on the fly and help you diagnose problems quickly. This can ultimately help you to build better websites faster. DevTools is also effective when you need to introduce new changes in the design mode.
The WhatFont tool is an extension that helps you to identify all fonts on a page. By hovering over any text on the page, you can see the name of the font. In order to find out complete information about the font, name, size, and even color, just click on the text.
Cross-browser and Cross-platform Testing Tools
A SaaS website or SaaS web app doesn’t work equally in all browsers. This may happen due to the difference in version of the browser under test, different behavior of the app or site on mobile vs tablet vs desktop devices, as well as variations in browsers themselves.
Cross-browser testing is a method of quality assurance for web applications across multiple browsers. To help with cross-browser testing, the Chrome extension Cross Browser Testing Local Connection allows you to test in 1500+ real desktop and mobile browsers.
Similarly, the User-Agent Switcher settings allow you to emulate browsers including Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, and platforms including iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
SaaS Testing Tools for Penetration Testing
Penetration testing is a type of security testing practices that simulate various actions that a hacker may attempt in order to penetrate an application. A pen test can identify a system’s vulnerabilities and thus help the SaaS solutions from online security threats.
For penetration testing of SaaS applications, the following web scanners can be used:
- OWASP Zap — this is a easy-to-use tool for security testing and for finding vulnerabilities in web apps.
- Burp Suite — this is one of the most popular tools for penetration testing because of its flexibility and ability to combine manual and automated security analysis methods when conducting web application security testing.
Conclusion
Though SaaS application testing often comes with its own challenges, having the right skillset and hiring a high-quality SaaS testing company can help minimize risks associated with it. Before releasing your SaaS application, you need to thoroughly test the product functionality, performance, infrastructure, security, API integration, and compatibility with different operating systems and platforms. This is why choosing the best SaaS testing company becomes so important.
Interestingly, selecting the best SaaS testing agency is just the first step in an organization’s SaaS testing outsourcing process. Next challenge that many organizations face these days is to find a SaaS website testing vendor that offer optimum ROI. With our cross browser test automation accelerator framework, CredibleSoft has emerged as a leading SaaS testing company to help you overcome those challenges. If you are an organization that is looking for some expert Cloud testing services to be outsourced at the best possible price ranges, then use this form to request an estimation and we’ll prepare and share the same with you free of cost.
