A Closer Look at Cloud-based Testing with Soasta
One of the themes many of us commentators harp on about is the fact that barriers to entry for application developers have never been lower - the availability of cloud hosting, agile development methodologies, even this crazy frothy investment cycle we're in all combine to see lots of applications being created.
One of the flip sides of al this app development is the corresponding drag on testing - that horrible stage that no one really likes, but everyone needs to do. One player looking to aid in that stage of the process is Soasta (rhymes with toaster!)
Soasta bills themselves as the "cloud testing pioneer", providing Web testing services to test performance, scalability and reliability of both websites and Web applications by simulating traffic spikes for both testing and production applications. CloudTest has a number of different offerings including;
- CloudTest Mobile for mobile application performance testing
- CloudTest Enterprise integrated internal and external testing with clouds such as Amazon EC2, IBM, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace.
- CloudTest Professional (Pro) more control and scale than the enterprise product
- CloudTest Standard an internal testing tool
- CloudTest On-Demand a full product+service offerings for organizations with no testing team themselves.
To this lineup Soasta is today launching a free product, CloudTest Lite, a downloadable app that gives organizations the ability to run limited testing (up to 100 virtual users, single server and behind-firewall testing only) including;
- Testing of web and mobile applications, including applications using HTML5 to REST Web services
- Test building with visual test creation tools
- Integration of application, system, and network monitoring data
- Analysis of results in real-time through a dashboard
- Upgrade path to a more scalable CloudTest edition
Interestingly this release comes only days after Atlassian announced its own new testing tool, as Klint Finley covered. The Atlassian Bonfire product is a browser plugin tool that is linked with Atlassian's Jira bug tracking tool to give end to end testing/notification/tracking supports. As such bonfire seems much lighter weight than Soasta, focusing less on the testing and analysis of that testing and more on identifying bugs - Soasta on the other hand is a complete testing and performance tuning application. You can see some sample screen shots below:
In demos the CloudTest product had a simple and intuitive test builder functionality that makes it easier for a testing team to spend less time designing tests, and more time running them - and that's never a bad thing. App testing has never been more important - with this new freemium offering, Soasta is hoping it will gain more customers for its suite of testing products.
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