We like to think that since we are part of this industry, and have a dialog with others in it (such as customers, experts, competitors and others), we know what’s currently going on and where is it going to (as much as this can be known). However, it’s always good to get some feedback on this “knowledge” from researchers, who study the industry in a more methodological and thorough way.

The most common prediction is getting more and more votes. A recent study by TechNavio Insights shows that testing – like many other software development units (and IT to this matter) – it is moving to the cloud.

Is it a bird? Is it a Plane? It’s Testing

The general term of Cloud hides behind it a few different terms related to testing. There’s the SaaS (Software as a Service), the TaaS (Testing as a Service) and the PaaS (Platform as a Service, on-demand application development platform). The new research shows that many companies, including big-size ones, understand the importance and the opportunities of the Cloud and are building their services to be available in this new form.

This goes even further when we look at new offerings (from new or existing companies) that are designed to be used as over-the-net, SaaS, Cloud applications (and you can pick your favorite term). Obviously customers are not happy to pay anymore the amounts previously paid for software, in advance, and then to add servers, people to maintain them, yearly application maintenance, upgrades, etc. Why should they, if they can subscribe rather than buy, pay for the usage only rather than commit and at the same time save all the hassle of installations.

What started with the hardware is very quickly spreading to software, and specifically to software testing. Look at all the tools available now online – test management, bug trackers, automation, mobile units virtualization, project management. You name it. So far it was the new small and mid-size vendors, but we expect the big players to join. They have no other choice. 

Need for Proof

Of course. Vendors of software testing application will have to stand to the same quality those “regular” apps have. Security has to be even tighter, and performance and availability must be superb. The challenge is huge, even before mentioning the different approach to service (including support, upgrades and on-going maintenance) that these vendors have to adopt.

Unlike installed solutions, the ease of switching to another solution provider in the Cloud will enforce vendors to take their standards to a higher level – at least those who will want to stay in the game.

It’s the golden era for customers – they will soon get better solutions, easier to manage, better services and in a lower price. The opportunities for customers are huge – solutions of TaaS will enable them to re-size their testing teams at will and reduce costs significantly. They will be able to use many testers in a short notice and for a limited time and perform much of the testing efforts faster. We believe there will be vendors offering solutions, which will be combination of community access (testers) and products (testing platforms and solutions).

Software testing has a bright future. After recognized in the past few years as an important part of the development effort, testers being part of the project teams and participating in all phases starting with the design, we will see more companies doing testing (easier and cheaper), doing more testing (testers available online and on-demand), using Cloud based solutions for the testing process. 

We’ll be there.

4 if you are really into washing your clothes as a hobby.

This applies to most of our appliances and gadgets, our mobile phones, ipods and digital cameras. We usually don’t even know what the options are; we simply use those we already know, or the most obvious ones.

Have you ever read the manual?

It’s always there. In the box. The manual.

It looks nice, written in 4 different languages, with 5 content pages and an index at the end. But what’s in it? Thicker than a Harry Potter book. No one knows…It’s a mystery as no one ever reads it. Some of us keep them in a drawer, some throw it away immediately.

And this is exactly why Testuff doesn’t come with a manual or a user guide. Not only that, we have worked hard to make it unnecessary. We strongly believe that applications which need training or a pre-sales rep to use are not good apps. Just as hardware comes in a ‘plug-and-play’ mode, so should applications. This is how Testuff comes. Simply install it and you are up-and-running in 5 minutes. It’s true, we do have an online help guide, but it’s more of an elaborated ‘FAQ’ section. Moreover, based on our user feedback, it is rarely needed or used.

What about the thousands of features a test management tool can have?

Yes, we know that there are always more features a system can have. There’s always another report, another way to navigate, a new tab, a new tick-box option or a drop-down selection box. The line between a fully featured app and an over-featured app is thin, but better stay on the right side of it. Simplicity is important and it doesn’t have to be in contradiction with giving users the full experience and answer all their needs. As Leonardo DaVinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, and we’d like to keep the Testuff simplicity, which our users like and appreciate so much.

Too many features, a too complicated application isn’t a good idea. Do that and now you need training, a rep to answer usability questions and you’ll end up with users using 20% of the system’s options and features anyway.

Such an approach will also lead to a higher sale price, and a higher implementation time and cost at the other end. It doesn’t work, and especially not in the SaaS business.

More features = More customers?

Our experience shows that more features aren’t necessarily what customers are looking for. Of course, they want to see that the basics (and then some) is covered well, but they will be looking at many other aspects when making the decision if both the company and the application are good enough for them.

Reliability, competitive pricing, ease of use, security, complexity of implementation in the organization, integration to other testing tools (automation, trackers), high quality and responsive support and more.

Albert Einstein said that “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Testuff does offer a fully featured package. However, there’s no need to learn how to use it, these features and options are used intuitively. You won’t find the likes of “tools –> options —> …”  buttons, but it’s all still there.

We have many debates here, long discussions about new features and new options we add to Testuff – whether they are required, will they make Testuff too complicated and less friendly. How many clicks a typical user needs to click through and whether we can make the process just a little shorter. There’s never a one only true solution. It’s more a keep-within-your-strategy thinking process.

Hopefully, we never end up with a complicated washing machine………

Particularly in this financial climate, we see more or more companies going bust, some of which are major brands. Only a few months ago they were all showing fantastic profits and no-one would ever imagine such a collapse. So how do you know who to put your faith in? What assurances can you expect to get from your business partners, suppliers and service providers?

Customers are asking us different questions, amongst which:
- How long has the company been in existence?
- How many employees do you have?
- How many clients do you have?
- What industry sectors do these clients operate in?

I guess that all these questions mean: “Are you a real company that is built to last?”, or – perhaps the real question is – are you just two students working in a warehouse with no penny, no future and no ability to survive more than a few months .

I believe that no company could promise such a thing, but what every CEO can promise is a commitment to manage the company in a responsible way and to take all the necessary steps to keep the company profitable and strong.

Sharing some business indicators that show that the company is ‘on the ball’ usually helps.

So what are our success indicators so far?:
- We have more then 1700 registered companies, with clear increase in new companies per day ratio.
- We see a steady growth in revenue over the very few months of commercial operation.
- We are earning more, and not losing money – our income is higher than our operational expenses.
- We have started expanding our business using selected affiliates.
- Our dev team releases a new major version every 4-6 weeks as planned.
- We keep meeting customer expectations and deliver feature requests consistently.
- Our support team responds to most queries within a few hours.
- We keep going.
- We keep going.
- We keep going

Sure. We can use some fancy slogans, promise that we will always be #1 and publish a press release for every new customer. But this is not our way here at Testuff.

I’m worried about reliability. There might be outages and congestion accessing hosted services on the Internet.

There are outages and congestion issues on the internal network as well. I remember servers going up and down, slow connectivity, and even worms shutting down communication in the whole internal network at one of my previous employers. There’s plenty of maintenance work that gets done in internal networks and the network admins don’t think too much before flipping the switch.

Even if you don’t use any SaaS per se and your internal network is operating at top speed, people can’t work without access to the Internet. Even if just Google.com goes down people stare dumbly at the screen or head to a coffee break. Everyone highly depends on the Internet in the software industry and if there are access problems to the Internet there’s more than just SaaS and Testuff at stake, but also search engines, webmail, knowledge sources like Wikipedia, blogs, and whatnot. In a certain sense of the word, we’re all using SaaS already, we just aren’t aware of it.

Truth of the matter is that SaaS is more reliable than local servers. Just look at uptime logs for site hosting on the net, you will find they are usually above 99%. Even when we had to take Testuff down for a DRP drill, we thought ten times before doing so, notified our customers plenty of time beforehand, and made sure it was for the shortest time possible.

Speaking of which, SaaS companies confirm to the highest reliability standards. Testuff has a DRP and we perform drills to make sure we’re on top of our game. All the Testuff data is backed up regularly and replicated for maximum resilience. We keep constant monitoring on our servers to make sure everything is working at all times.

Do you get this kind of service for your local servers? If so, how much is it costing you? Are you concerned with SaaS reliability? Is your internal network truly reliable? Drop a comment and tell us about it.

]]> http://www.testuff.com/blog/2008/12/fear-of-saas-reliability/feed/ 3 http://www.testuff.com/blog/2008/11/fear-of-saas-security/ http://www.testuff.com/blog/2008/11/fear-of-saas-security/#comments Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:21:36 +0000 admin http://www.testuff.com/blog/?p=242 Last week I started a series of posts to examine why people are afraid of SaaS. So, let’s dive in and examine one of the fears that I have seen come up all too often – fear of SaaS security. Someone who’s afraid that SaaS isn’t secure may make the following claim:

I don’t use SaaS because I’m afraid of security. Keeping the data on our internal network is safer.

Well my friend, the internal network is not as safe as you think it is. It’s not completely cut off from the Internet like networks in the good old days. There’s always an access point to the net and open ports in the firewall that allow viruses, worms, and hackers to get through and exploit security holes. With security holes being exploited, your data could leak out or get destroyed altogether.

Also, as the cliche says, most break-ins happen from inside the company. Organizations keep a very strict security policy for incoming connections. What about outgoing connections? Or connections that don’t even reach the external firewall? What measures are put in the internal network to make sure it’s secure? In most cases the answer will probably be “not much” until some disgruntled employee who has been cut loose decides to wreck havoc.

Even if you do have internal servers, it’s likely that not all company data is stored in the internal network anyhow. Do you use Gmail/Yahoo Mail/Hotmail/Messenger to communicate with co-workers, clients, send company files, and whatnot? Maybe even Google Docs to work on your documents from anywhere? If so, even though you may not like to admit it, you’re already using SaaS. Some of the company data is lying outside of your internal network, and according to the above line of thought it’s “unsafe”.

What about SaaS? How can hosting services somewhere out there in the web be secure? We’ve seen why the internal network isn’t that great, but that doesn’t make SaaS any safer. So, let’s explore some key points in favor of SaaS when it comes to security.

Since SaaS is accessible from anywhere, SaaS vendors offer stronger security than internal servers. Let’s see how Testuff measures as a SaaS vendor. From the administrative side, the Testuff servers are protected behind firewalls with the utmost strict of policies. We got security people monitoring the servers 24/7 to make sure everything is Kosher. Security patches are updated to our servers at a very high frequency as well. Of course our clients’ data belongs to them and we’re willing to sign an NDA if it’s necessary.

From the technological side, Testuff DBs can only be accessed via user and password. Passwords aren’t even saved on the servers, just their hashes are. All communication to the Testuff servers is encrypted via SSL. Testuff databases are also encrypted, so even if someone were to steal one somehow the sun would burn out before they would be able to decrypt it. Customer DBs are all separated logically, so one customer just can’t access data that belongs to another customer. Are your internal servers as secure as this?

Ironically, using hosted services for company data makes it harder for inside workers to hack. They obviously don’t have any privileges, control, or inside info to go and abuse the system like they would abuse internal servers. With security policies wound much tighter, a pissed off worker would have a much more difficult time to hack a hosted service than a server on the internal network.

Last but not least, as I already mentioned, you’re probably already using SaaS and everything is OK. Not only is it OK, but it’s making your work day more productive and comfortable. You get great tools and can easily collaborate with people around the globe or even in the next room with a service like Google Documents. So if you already use some SaaS, isn’t it possible that SaaS in additional fields may turn out to kick ass? Say a test management SaaS?

To sum it all up, it’s a myth that SaaS isn’t secure. In fact, SaaS can be more secure than locally hosted servesr. Of course, before you sign up with a SaaS vendor make sure their security policies fit the bill.

Security is important, but it’s not everything, so we’ll continue exploring people’s fears of SaaS next time. Until then, what are your security concerns when it comes to SaaS? Do you feel that SaaS vendors are fulfilling them, or are they lacking in some way? Drop a comment and let me know!

Also, we had the exemplary success of Salesforce.com, a hosted CRM service. We figured if people are willing to host data about their customers online, one of the most valuable assets of a company, they shouldn’t have much trouble hosting their test data online.

Right? Wrong. From time to time I get an email from one of our customers that reads more or less as follows:

I really like Testuff. Do you have a local installation of the Testuff server? We don’t want to keep our testing data outside the internal network and depend on a hosted service.

Looks like people are reluctant to keep their testing data online. It seems to stem from several fears about SaaS, fears that you may have as well. I’d like to address these fears directly in a short series of posts and see if they make sense. That is, if you’re worse off having your test data hosted than hosting it yourself in the internal network.

In the meantime, let me know what you think about SaaS! Do you use any hosted services other than Testuff? If so, which ones? What do you like about them? If you don’t use any SaaS, what are your concerns?