Best Practices for SaaS Software Testing & Quality Assurance

 Corporates come across immense challenge when they migrate from traditional development platform to SaaS based software deployment. The constraints can be language for different regions, performance issues etc. When we think about testing for SaaS based software, we primarily emphasize  on three things; a> Scalability b> Released Processes and c> Architecture.

SaaS based software testing can be categorized in the following areas.

a>  Functional Testing: As like any other platform, you have to make sure that the functionality of the software is working properly. The following test can be conducted to confirm this ie.

•  Manual test scripts
•  Exploratory charters
• Checklists
•  End-to-end scenarios

You can also use some type of tools like Selenium to automate regression test.

Multi Platform support: You can use both physical and virtual machines to test on multi platform like Windows, Mac and Linux and also on the browsers like IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Security: You have to keep an eye of your SaaS software from any external threat. In order to do this, you have to plug the gap so that cross-site scripting and other security loopholes can be avoided.

Load and Stress Test: It may be possible that your software is used by large number of users simultaneously. So, it is crucial that you conduct some type of Stress or Load test to simulate real life scenario. You can try Jmeter as a stress tool.

Disaster Recovery and Rollback: If system is down due to any power outage or other disaster, it should be brought up as soon as possible.  Additionally, there has to be rollback option to the last known good version of the data.

Language: Since, Saas platform is used by different clients from different locations, you have to make sure that it supprts the international language.

Remote Usage: Since, clients from different locations can use the SaaS platform, it is important that those people can access to the system with good response time. You can use some kind of emulators to conduct the test. But, the best thing to create real life situation is to use the collaborators. They can conduct the test and report the results.