Enabling Automated Integration Testing of Cloud Application Services in Virtualized Environments
Tariq M. King, Annaji S. Ganti, David Froslie · 2014
Software development under the cloud comput-ing model brings the advantage that new ap-plications can be rapidly constructed by tai-loring existing services. However, the use of Internet-based services as software compo-nents, leads to the development of applications in which some building blocks are hosted re-motely, rather than locally in a controlled en-vironment. This aspect of cloud-based develop-ment, when coupled with factors such as service autonomy, complexity, and high dependability criteria, make software testing of the cloud es-pecially challenging. In this paper we present a novel approach to support integration testing of applications that depend on remotely-hosted cloud services. Our approach seeks to reuse elements of the test au-tomation, typically built to validate a cloud ser-vice prior to its deployment, for the realization of Test Support-as-a-Service (TSaaS). TSaaS provides developers with a set of functions that enable integration testing of cloud services us-ing controlled virtual environments. To facili-tate continued evaluation of our approach, we have implemented a prototype of TSaaS that is compatible with the Windows Azure platform. Copyright c © 2011 Tariq M. King, Annaji S. Ganti, and David Froslie. Permission to copy is hereby granted provided the original copyright notice is reproduced in copies made. 1