Design Product Quality Software + Services

Design Product Quality Software + Services

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Investigating the Testability of Cloud Application Services

Tariq King, Assistant Professor, NDSUAnnaji Ganti, SDET, Microsoft Dynamics GP

May 3, 2011

Cloud Computing

Delivers Software Applications, Platforms and Infrastructures as services over Web

Software-as-a-Service

Like conventional applications, but hosted and deployed in a cloud environment

Helps end users performa specific task

Provides ubiquitous accessapplications and user data

New application services can be developed by tailoringexisting cloud services

Motivating Research Question #1

What makes SaaS more difficult or easierto test than conventional applications during development and maintenance?

CloudTestability

Impact on Application Development

Dark Side of Cloud Application Testability

Remoteness

InformationHiding

Complexity

StatefulnessHigh Dependability & Performance Requirements

Autonomy

Paradigm Infancy

= Grand Challenge

Bright Side of Cloud Application

Testability Deployed in an Environment Characterized

By…Computation

alPower

Storage

Virtualization

Testing requires lots of resources and such an environment facilitates test execution

Specific Challenge… Towards a Solution

Cloud applications can be built on services that are not locally owned or controlled

Testability is reduced due to lack of controland observation of parts of the application

Question #2: Can we use the test automation tooling, created during service development, to help address this issue?

Question #3 : What about using the cloud itself to address the cloud testability challenges?

Test Support as-a-Service (TSaaS)

Providers A and B Expose Test Support as-a-Service to Provider C

Development Methodology for TSaaS

Automated Test Scripts Used as the Basis for TSaaS Design

Test Libraries

Test Initialization

Test Data

Test Cleanup

Test Methods Provide Reusable Control and Observation Points

Preconditions

Assertions

Inputs

TSaaS Architectural Model

TSaaS Prototype

Lessons Learned

Successful implementation of the prototype validates the TSaaS development method

Merely lays the foundation for investigation into the overall approach

Major factors to success were test case parameterization technique, and runtime virtualization support through Hyper-V API

Technical difficulties: Combination of runtime virtualization, testing, and development

Current Direction: Azure Deployment

Much work still needed to evaluate overall testing approach

Must deploy TSaaS to the cloud and perform controlled experiments

Prototype has been build in a manner that streamlines moving it to Windows Azure

Install Windows Azure SDK and prerequisites

Configure Baseline VHD using Azure SDK

Migrate SQL Server 2008 R2 Data to SQL Azure

Future Vision: A Self-Testable Cloud