Research Issues for Software Testing in the Cloud

       This paper discusses the research issues that cloud computing imposes on software testing. These issues were gathered during interviews with industry practitioners from eleven software organizations. The interviews were analyzed using qualitative grounded theorymethod. Findings of the study were compared with existing literature. The research issues were categorized according to application, management, legal and financial issues. By addressing these issues, researchers can offer reliable recommendation for practitioners in the industry.

        Testing in the Cloud:

Testing in the cloud or cloud testing can have three facets
(1) the system or application under test is accessible online.

(2) testing infrastructure and platforms are hosted across different deployment models of the cloud i.e. public, community, private or hybrid clouds;

(3) testing of the cloud itself. Cloud environments should be tested and measured for their performance, availability, security and scalability in order to support efficient delivery of services.

Examples of testing services that are already being deployed in the cloud are presented below:

Cloud9 is a web service that enables parallel symbolic execution of computer clusters operating on public cloud infrastructures such as Amazon EC2 as well as on clusters running cloud software like Eucalyptus；

D-cloud is a largescale software testing environment that uses cloud computing technology i.e. Eucalyptus for cloud management and QEMU - an open source machine emulator - for virtualization .

The York Extensible Testing Infrastructure (YETI) is an automated random testing tool with the ability to test programs written in different programming languages；

Another testing service in the cloud is the autonomic selftesting(AST) and test support as-a-service (TSaaS) that makes use of processing capabilities provided by the cloud to improve self-testing processes .

 Another example is the virtualization-aware automated testing service (VATS) ,which enhances testing services in the cloud by executing
tests and managing virtual infrastructure. In addition, the remote network labs (RNL), is an on-demand network cloud that enables users to build virtual test laboratories.