Conventional Software Testing Vs. Cloud Testing

Software Testing is one of the important activities in software development process. Depending on the testing method employed, software testing can be implemented at any time in the development process. Traditionally most of the test effort occurs after the requirements have been defined and the coding process has been completed, but in the agile approaches most of the test effort is on-going. Conventional testing requires expensive dedicated infrastructure and resources that are only used sporadically. The growing complexity of business applications, it is harder to build and maintain in-house testing facilities that mimic real-time environments. Cloud computing has opened up new opportunities for software testing, which provides unlimited resources with scalability, flexibility and availability of distributed testing environment. It reduces the execution time of testing of large applications and lead to cost-effective solutions. However, it also explores challenges such as data security and a lack of standards. In this paper we present a comparative study on conventional software testing with cloud testing. We also highlight the challenges of these testing paradigms.