Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the Internet.

SaaS testing is different from traditional web application testing.  We need to consider the additional criteria specific to the cloud environment along with our regular web application testing.

Few vital qualities that we feel every tester should go upon for doing SaaS testing. Nevertheless, it’s not limited to just five.

• Availability
• Business Workflows
• Interoperability
• Performance
• Security

Availability

The SaaS application is deployed in the cloud and it is necessary to make sure the system is up 24/7 and available to access by the customers without any downtime. To monitor this you can use the application monitoring tools like Newrelic, uptimerobot, Pingdom. These tools will notify us if any glitches in accessing the application periodically based on the configuration of alerts.

Business Workflows

In any application, testing business workflows is critical and important. Business workflows are the scenarios which every user will use them often and without that, they are not able to perform their tasks. We need to collect the business workflows and prepare test cases for those. In every release, we need to execute these test cases and confirm that these scenarios working flawlessly.

Interoperability

Each SaaS application should be functional in various environments and platforms without any issues.  Since the users will not be in the same location as the OOn-premises applications. We need to test the application in mostly used environments to make sure the user experience better to the customers.

Performance

Performance is the most critical part of the SaaS applications. Every module should be performance tested along with the business workflows. The application should be scalable when the application usage is heavy. We need to build a strategy to do this and capacity planning. After that, we have to do performance testing periodically. This will ensure the application’s response time better in the heavy usage and not impacted by new releases.

Security

Security testing needs to be carried out to find out any threats and data privacy from intruders. It is also a keen point which the users will look for the confirmation regarding this.

Hope these five tips will help nurture your skillset as a tester. Apart from this, you can also get a little help from a test management tool to make you smarter and get things done sooner in an organized way.

References:

https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/Software-as-a-Service