In today’s fast-paced business environment, organizations are under constant pressure to roll out new products quickly and feature ahead of the competition. However, manual testing processes can significantly slow down the release cycles and time-to-market. Organizations that rely on manual testing often find it challenging to keep up with the rapid development pace, resulting in delayed product launches.

To achieve faster time-to-market, organizations need to streamline their testing processes. Test automation solves this problem by creating repeatable test scripts to quickly validate new code changes across various platforms.

Due to the diverse range of browsers used globally, testing in real-world situations is essential to ensure websites and applications work seamlessly for users. For example, we often encounter various web browsers when discussing browser fragmentation. For example, it holds the following market share:

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Setting up and updating an infrastructure with real browsers, devices, and OS for testing a website or app can be impractical. Cloud testing addresses this challenge by providing testers access to various browsers used globally and multiple tools to conduct tests efficiently. 

This approach saves organization resources compared to setting up a test lab, making the testing process simpler and more comprehensive. In this article, we will learn everything about cloud-based automation testing and how to achieve faster time-to-market using automated testing on the cloud.

What is Cloud-Based Automation Testing?

Cloud-based automation testing involves running test cases within a robust remote desktop environment. It enhances automation testing by introducing scheduled runs across various browsers and operating systems.

Test automation on the cloud is highly suitable for organizations that aim to shorten testing cycles and speed up release velocity. These organizations can migrate all testing to the cloud, integrate it with their current infrastructure, or keep all testing on-premises.

A key benefit of cloud test automation is offloading redundant tasks to cloud providers. For example, exhaustive manual regression testing after each software build consumes significant time and resources. Automating regression suites frees teams from these tedious tasks to focus on more productive work. Integration with popular test frameworks through cloud APIs allows running regression test cases on-demand while development progresses.

Cloud testing facilitates access to vast and diverse testing environments. On-premises test labs require substantial investments to emulate real-world user conditions. However, cloud labs can simulate countless platforms and locations, providing application exposure to global, real-user scenarios. This improves software resiliency by uncovering issues that may only surface in specific settings.

Why Time to Market Matters?

Time to Market (TTM) measures the duration from product conception to first market availability. For innovative offerings especially, fast time-to-market often makes or breaks business success. Being first-to-market with new capabilities allows for greater visibility, customer adoption, and long-term revenue. Thus, time-to-market is a pivotal benchmark across software organizations.

Accelerating time to market offers several advantages:

• Increased Revenues: Getting your product or service to market faster allows you to start generating revenues sooner. This boosts overall revenue potential and enables sustained financial success.
• Lower Costs: A shorter time to market often results in lower production costs. The cost efficiencies enhance profitability and lead to more favorable economics.
• Expanded Market Share: Being first to market before competitors enter allows for capturing greater market share. 
• Technological Leadership: Getting to market quickly reinforces perception as an innovator and leader. This makes recruiting talent and attracting partners easier.

Benefits of Automation Testing On Cloud

Cloud-based test automation offers the following benefits:

• Scalability: The cloud’s on-demand scaling lets developers spin up test environments and resources instantly as needed. This flexibility helps test new features, fix bugs, or run exploratory tests without capacity bottlenecks.
• Collaboration: Distributed teams worldwide get real-time access to shared testing resources on the cloud. No matter where developers, testers, and DevOps engineers are located, they can concurrently execute automation suites, inspect dashboards and logs, and collaborate seamlessly. 
• Cost Savings: Procuring, maintaining, and upgrading on-premise hardware carries massive capital costs and operational overheads. Cloud’s usage-based pricing converts these fixed expenses into flexible operating costs, only paying for what you use. Dynamic scaling up and down optimizes utilization, minimizing expenses.
• Parallel Testing: The cloud facilitates running large automation suites spanning thousands of tests in parallel across browsers, devices, and platforms, which is impossible locally. This simultaneous execution generates a holistic picture of system quality and behavior under varied, realistic conditions in a compressed time frame.
• Time-to-Market (TTM): Cloud-based test automation significantly reduces time-to-market. By enabling parallel testing and providing scalable, flexible resources, the cloud helps quickly pinpoint and fix defects. This accelerated testing delivers high-quality software to users faster, meeting demands and providing a competitive edge. 

How to Perform Automation Testing on Cloud

Following are the key steps for doing automation testing on the cloud :

1. Define Testing Objectives

The first primary step is to clearly define your testing objectives. This includes identifying the specific target applications or components that require testing. Determine what types of testing you need, such as functional, performance, security, etc. You also need to define the environments (operating systems, browsers, devices, etc.) you must test against. Having clear testing goals and scope lays the foundation for choosing the right cloud testing tools.

2. Research and Select Cloud Testing Platforms

The next step is to research and select the leading cloud testing platforms like LambdaTest; this AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform provides access to a cloud grid of 3000+ real browser and operating system combinations. This allows running automated tests in parallel across this grid to achieve extensive test coverage across platforms. 

For example, a test suite can execute simultaneous test runs on browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browser online on Windows, Linux, and Mac machines. This degree of massive cross-browser and parallel testing is exceptionally challenging in traditional on-premise environments. Leveraging the scale and flexibility of cloud testing grids helps testers maximize test coverage for their target applications. 

3. Set Up Test Environments

Once you have chosen a cloud testing platform, the next step is to set up test environments that mirror your production infrastructure. This involves provisioning operating systems, browsers, and device instances and configuring network settings to simulate real-world conditions.

4. Develop Automated Test Scripts

With the test environment in place, the next phase is to develop automated test scripts. You can leverage popular test automation frameworks like Power Automate, Selenium or Appium or proprietary tools offered by the testing platforms. Focus on enhancing long-term reusability and maintainability of scripts through page object model, modularity, etc.

5. Execute and Monitor Test Runs

Once your test environments are set up and automated test scripts are implemented, the next step is to execute test runs. One of the significant advantages of cloud testing is the ability to leverage parallel testing – running tests simultaneously across hundreds of browsers and devices to reduce overall execution time. Closely monitor ongoing and completed test cycles through centralized test reporting and logs made available.

6. Integrate With CI/CD Pipelines

The final step to realizing the full benefits of cloud testing is to integrate your cloud testing platform and workflows with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. This enables automatically triggering test runs every time developers check in new code changes. Seamlessly shifting testing earlier in the development life cycle.

Best Practices for Achieving Faster Time-to-Market 

Following are some best practices for achieving faster time-to-market using automated testing on cloud:

• Adopt Agile and DevOps Strategies: Transitioning to Agile and DevOps is key to eliminating barriers and enabling team collaboration for faster releases. Adopting Agile boosts responsiveness to change, while DevOps culture and practices help seamless software building, testing, and deployment.

• Select the Right Cloud Platform: Choosing the optimal cloud platform is foundationally important to maximize the benefits of test automation. Evaluate leading offerings like LambdaTest based on your specific needs and environment.

• Set Up Cloud Test Environments: Provision test environments on the cloud that closely match production infrastructure. Use infrastructure-as-code tools to automate building and managing test environments for consistency. 

• Implement CI/CD Pipelines: Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) help seamlessly automate building, testing, and release processes. Cloud-based CI/CD pipelines run automated test suites in parallel every time code is checked for faster feedback. Issues are caught early.

• Expand Test Coverage: Cloud testing enables running extensive test suites, spanning browsers, platforms, and devices, which is challenging to accomplish locally. Comprehensive test coverage ensures that all impact areas are taken care of, boosting confidence and enabling faster releases.

• Improve Test Data Management: Smart test data strategies prevent data bottlenecks. TDM tools offered on the cloud generate high volumes of high-quality, compliant synthetic test data, helping anticipate production edge cases faster. Test cloning efficiently copies prod data to staging, retaining referential integrity.

Conclusion

As competitive pressures mandate faster release cycles, organizations need accelerated yet reliable testing strategies. Cloud-based automation provides versatile on-demand environments and infrastructure to run extensive test suites in parallel. Integrating with CI/CD pipelines shifts testing left, flags defects promptly, and feeds back results to developers faster.

However, simply lifting and shifting existing testing to the cloud yields suboptimal outcomes. The key is optimizing processes and tools for cloud scale. Strategic priority setting, test coverage expansion, test data mastering, result analysis, and issue tracking transform cloud adoption. Progress monitoring ensures tests execute reliably within budgets.

When implemented with Agile and DevOps, cloud automation multiplies productivity, efficiency, and release velocity. Comprehensive test coverage across platforms and regions becomes feasible. When used together, these best practices achieve superior time-to-market and customer satisfaction through higher-quality software releases. Cloud testing both future-proofs QA capabilities as complexity increases and unlocks innovation potential through time savings.