SaaS is an acronym for Software as a Service, and it’s a software licensing and delivery model where you deliver the software over the internet. SaaS products are centrally hosted and easily accessible by customers on a subscription basis through the internet. Due to lower cost, higher availability, scalability, reliability, etc., SaaS has made a name for itself in the software industry.
- Global spending on public cloud services will exceed $480 billion by 2022.
- SaaS organizations will be using 85% of software by 2025.
- The worth of the SaaS market will become $171.9 billion by 2022.
All these statistics indicate that the software industry’s future is SaaS, and therefore, ensuring the high-quality and robustness of these products is paramount. For this purpose, the role of SaaS product testing comes into the picture. This blog will provide a comprehensive guide on SaaS product testing and analyze its types, challenges, best practices, and tools.
What is SaaS product testing?
SaaS product testing is the procedure to ensure the quality of your SaaS products. For this purpose, you need to conduct various validation tests related to crucial characteristics such as security, performance, scalability, data integration, reliability, etc. In addition to all these, SaaS product testing is an opportunity for testers to enhance their product’s quality and robustness.
Here are some reasons for which you should conduct SaaS product testing:
- For ensuring easy fault recovery
- Improving reliability, scalability, and availability
- Reducing internal system dependencies
- Flexibility in scaling and pricing model
- Quicker deployment due to higher accessibility
- Easy update and upgrade for customers
- Reduction in software maintenance cost
Now, you must have a basic understanding of SaaS product testing and what it brings to the table. However, to implement it into reality, you need to understand various types of SaaS product testing. So, let’s analyze that aspect.
Types of SaaS product testing
- Performance Testing: It verifies the performance of your SaaS application. For this purpose, the performance of each module gets tested. Load testing, stress testing, scalability testing, failure testing, recovery testing, etc., are popular techniques.
- Compatibility Testing: It checks whether your SaaS application is compatible with various browsers, OSs, platforms, mobile devices, hardware, etc. Remember that it’s impossible to conduct SaaS product testing for all possible hardware configurations.
- Functional Testing: It verifies whether the app is working as desired or not. You can implement functional testing in an environment by conducting manual testing. A famous example is browser compatibility testing, regression testing, reliability testing, etc.
- API Testing: In any SaaS product development, you will see a lot of third-party APIs for providing add-on features. Therefore, conducting API interface testing becomes vital as it ensures safety, reliability, high performance, and accessibility of API documentation.
- Infrastructure and Safety Testing: It checks whether your SaaS product or application is safe and secure from typical web application security vulnerabilities such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), SQL Injection, etc.
- Maintenance Testing: A dedicated operational group is responsible for conducting maintenance testing. It verifies the proper performance of applications, customer service, and billing. With built-in instruments, teams can conduct such testing.
These were different types of testing that you can conduct for SaaS products and applications. The process is not as easy in theory. There are a lot of challenges that one needs to overcome. Let’s get aware of all these challenges in our next section.
Challenges of SaaS product testing
- User behavior keeps on changing with the evolution of the product, and therefore, taking care of data privacy and security becomes a massive challenge for testers.
- Back-end components that may have a significant role in user interface get left out while conducting SaaS product testing as the central focus is on the front-end side of things.
- There is no standardization of how to build a SaaS product or application, and therefore, planning a general testing strategy won’t work as each scenario is unique in itself.
- In SaaS products, you have frequent updates and releases. Thus, verifying the validity of the application in a short period becomes a highly complicated task for the testing team.
- Performance testing is one of the essential aspects of SaaS product testing. First, you need to identify the most accessed areas and then test them with large numbers of users from different locations, which is very challenging.
- Whenever there is any new release, you need to test all the licensing factors such as usage, the number of users, and the application functionality.
- When you’re migrating any SaaS application, maintaining the integrity and privacy of the data becomes a challenge for the testing team.
These are some of the most common challenges you need to overcome for successful SaaS product testing. However, if you follow some of the best practices, the task becomes more straightforward. Let us analyze those in detail in our next section.
Best practices for SaaS product testing
- Have a thorough test plan ready in advance after getting details related to testing requirements specifications.
- Conduct security checks frequently, especially when migrating or integrating SaaS products or applications.
- Observe organizational patterns to help you enhance the SaaS testing efforts.
- Make sure you’ve full access to the testing requirements needed for the SaaS product.
- Utilize powerful hardware to help you gauge the performance of your SaaS app.
- Conduct load and stress tests frequently by adding concurrent users from multiple environments. It will give you an idea of whether your app is ready for launch or not.
With best practices known, it’s time to get aware of the top tools available for conducting SaaS product testing. These tools will reduce your workload and enhance the quality of your product.
Top tools for SaaS product testing
- qTest: A cloud-based testing tool for scalable testing management. The tool will also allow you to plan test case documentation, defect sheets, test cases, and test results.
- PractiTest: The tool focuses on end-to-end testing and allows the users to control the development and testing lifecycle. It also provides a way to manage all testing procures.
- QMetry: The tool acts as a bridge between project requirements and test cases. It links the related ones to provide end-to-end coverage of project progress with utmost ease.
Wrapping up
The rigorousness of SaaS product testing determines the quality and robustness of your SaaS products or applications. High-quality testing will help you stand out from your competitors and establish your brand as a leader in your niche. Therefore, before launching your SaaS product, it becomes essential to test it on various parameters. This blog provides you with a complete guide on what, why, and how to conduct SaaS product testing. We hope this will help you when you plan to launch your SaaS product shortly.
