Testing cloud services – Testing in production

In traditional development projects, a support department is present that takes over responsibility for the software after it is implemented in production. Patches, changes, and so on are tested and rolled out by the support department. The supplier maintains the services, so the customer doesn’t need a support department for the maintenance of the service itself. Despite the savings that can be achieved, this poses a problem because test activities still need to be done with and around the service. It seems obvious that the test manager, as in the implementation phase, has this responsibility. In addition, it is important to determine whether the supplier keeps their promises with regard to nonfunctional attributes, such as availability and performance. Testing, the use of monitoring tools, and logging are the appointed measures.

Checklist test measures ’testing in production’

• 5.9.1 Continuity in production in the case of changes
  • Changes in the service
  • Changes in other systems
  • Changes at the supplier
  • Growth
  • Changes in connected resources
  • Changes to the Internet
• 5.9.2 Measuring guarantees
  • Availability
  • Performance
  • Scalability
  • Security
• 5.9.3 Original selection criteria evaluation
• 5.9.4 Practical points
  • (E2E) Regression test
  • Measurement methods for KPIs