6 Challenges Of Testing SaaS Applications
SaaS has gained huge popularity in the last couple of years, with an increasing number of enterprises adopting it mainly due to the benefits like pay per use and on demand service. SaaS applications entail thorough testing for their integrity, different from that of on-premise applications. This involves testing of business logic, security, data integration, performance, and scalability, among others. Some of the challenges involved in testing SaaS applications are mentioned below.
1. Security and Privacy Testing
Being in a multi-tenant environment, SaaS applications need to ensure security, accessibility, and privacy concerns. They need to be tested for accessibility by simulating users with different privileges. The testing needs to ensure that one tenant’s data cannot be shared with another tenant. Some of the security testing includes SQL injections and testing cookies. Simulating such test using different user behaviors is a daunting task.
2. Short Notice Period and Frequent Releases
With frequent upgrades from SaaS application providers, it becomes necessary that the customers test the application for validity and security. The service provider usually allows one- or two-weeks’ time to the QA team for this. Ensuring that the existing application is running successfully and maintains security within such a short period is a challenging task. Moreover, any kind of testing or simulation of live upgrades on the application can hamper the work of existing users.
3. Performance testing
It is important to identify the most used parts of the applications and test them for performance. Simulating the real-life scenario using a massive number of users, users from different locations, and other varying factors in which the applications will run is a difficult task.
4. Integration and Migration
Integrating the SaaS application with other clients’ applications requires data integration testing for both incoming and outgoing data. This is a challenging task to test for data validation and at the same time for maintaining data security and privacy. Data migration between SaaS applications or from other applications requires a lot of time to understand the requirements and test the integration results.
5. Business Knowledge
It is very important to realize that clients must have people with in-depth business knowledge of the SaaS application. This will help in sorting out the configurable and non-configurable components and to realize the impact of change on these components. The SaaS application needs to be tested for business workflows and component functionalities.
6. Licensing
Licensing of SaaS applications varies on usage, functionality and number of concurrent users. It is important to test for all these parameters after a new release is made.
Jack Rosenblum
