Unveiling 6 QA Points for Delivering High-Quality SaaS-Based Application
The market for software as a service (SaaS) is projected to be valued at roughly 197 billion US dollars (181.37 billion euros) in 2023 and to reach 232 billion US dollars (212.50 billion Euro) by 2024. Cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) applications can be accessed via a web browser, desktop and mobile apps, or both.
Over 94% of businesses worldwide have shifted to the cloud. The flexibility of the remote working culture is the driving force behind this shift to the cloud.
As businesses everywhere use SaaS solutions for a range of business operations, the global SaaS market is predicted to keep expanding. These include web hosting, e-commerce, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer resource management (CRM) solutions.
Let’s look at the key testing aspects for delivering high-quality SaaS-based Applications.
Types of SaaS-based products
Here are some of the most common types of SaaS applications
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Most eCommerce organisations use CRM platforms such as Salesforce to run their activities efficiently.
Through cloud application development services, building sales processes, managing contacts, creating pipelines, tracking leads, reaching target audiences, and building relationships.
The development of customised functions such as marketing automation and progress tracking assures an upgrade in business efficiency.
Accounting SaaS: Accounting SaaS is a cloud-based software that provides general ledgers, accounts receivable and payables, payrolls, inventories, and financial reports to assist in efficient business accounting.
Businesses can adjust the number of users, and it’s scalable. The benefits of accounting SaaS software include cost reduction, enhanced efficiency, timely data access, greater security, and scalability. Examples are QuickBooks Online, Xero, FreshBooks, NetSuite, and Sage Intacct.
Project Management: Businesses employ project management software to effectively facilitate the planning and implementation of projects, as well as monitor their course, even on minor missions up to difficult enterprises.
These include task management, timesheets, teamwork, and project reporting. The widely used project management software comprises Asana, Trello, Monday.com, and others.
These tools are important in enhancing efficiency in costs, timely project delivery, etc.
Human Resources: Employers manage pertinent operations such as payroll, staff tracking, hiring and onboarding, training, employee benefits, etc. by subscribing to HRM software.
A few HRM tools that are widely used by businesses include Dynamics 365 Human Resources and SuccessFactors HCM.
With powerful SaaS HR solutions, you can achieve a high level of automation. This makes it possible to reduce the complexity of personnel life cycle management and save time on tedious tasks. Additionally, these tools provide sophisticated analytics and reporting features for data-driven choices.
Some other well known SaaS-based products include Salesforce, Communication, Hubspot, Slack, SaaS HR for example.
SaaS-based products are becoming more and more popular among businesses because they provide cutting-edge features like scalability, frequent updates, and the availability and affordability of cloud resources.
Furthermore, businesses also benefit from switching to SaaS-based applications because they can adjust the business application architecture according to their business requirements.
So let’s now consider Saas testing.
What is SaaS testing?
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) testing is a procedure used to evaluate the functionality of SaaS solutions. The goal is to determine if the software solution can meet its objectives.
Testers' primary goal when testing SaaS-based products is to ensure that the software improves performance, security, usability, accessibility, scalability, reliability, integration, and data integration and meets the requirements of the subscribing users.
To meet this objective, testers use multiple types of testing or main QA points that include: API testing, usability testing, performance testing, security testing, functional testing, automation testing and more.
Six SaaS Testing Techniques for Validating SaaS-Based Application
You have ample test types to exercise SaaS-based applications, but we’ll focus on the trending approaches that you can use according to the software you are using.
1. Functional Testing (including Acceptance and System Testing)
In these phases, testers confirm that it satisfies the user's requirements and performs correctly as a fully integrated system.
During Acceptance testing, Team Testers, Business users and even Beta customers test the software to ensure that promised features are working as intended.
System testing is a process that evaluates an application's components to ensure they work together as a complete system. It's also known as black-box testing as testing is typically undertaken without any exposure to the underlying code and logic.
Acceptance and System testing are usually undertaken later in the testing lifecycle and are necessary because it helps identify any defects or issues that may arise when the software is deployed to end users. They are typically seen in a V Model testing approach
Why SaaS-Based Product Validation Requires Functional (Acceptance and System) Testing
Functional testing plays a crucial role in validating the SaaS-based applications to check that:
1. Enhances User Experience
2. Mitigates Risks and Reduces Costs
3. Supports Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)
4. Finds and removes bugs to assure quality and functionality.
5. Verifies functionality against requirements.
2. Performance Testing
This testing will assess how the application performs and behaves under planned and excess load and saturation.
The primary goal of this testing is to assess the system's capacity to function under various workload and condition scenarios, including volume, speed, and concurrency of transactions.
Since these tests are typically automated, they can be repeated whenever required as the system continues to evolve.
Why Performance testing is needed to Validate SaaS-Based Products
Performance testing is necessary to validate SaaS-based applications for a number of reasons.
1. Assures optimal user experience to check responsiveness, scalability, and availability
2. Identifies and mitigates performance bottlenecks like database performance, memory leaks, resource utilisation, etc.
3. Optimises the distribution of resources
4. Enhances product competitiveness
3. Usability Testing
Usability testing is a process by which a product, system, or service is evaluated to improve the user experience (UX).
Testing is primarily done to determine how users interact with a product or service and how positive their experience has been.
During usability testing, a set of users are asked to use the product or service to complete a given set of tasks. Testers make observations, such as users' reactions, difficulties, and overall experience.
Feedback is collected so that designers and developers understand how the product can be improved.
Why Usability Testing is Needed to Validate SaaS-Based Products
Usability testing is an indispensable step in the validation process for SaaS-based products for multiple reasons.
1. Ensuring User Adoption and Retention
2. Rapid iteration and improvement
3. Recognising user needs and behaviour
4. Quantifying the Impact of Design Decisions
4. Security Testing
Security testing is a critical process for identifying and addressing vulnerabilities in information systems.
These susceptibilities can be exploited by attackers to gain unauthorised access to data, disrupt operations, or hack sensitive information.
5. API testing
API testing is a type of software testing that verifies that an application program interface (API) meets expectations.
This testing is important for ensuring the functionality, performance, and security of SaaS applications. Furthermore, it is important for SaaS applications because it ensures that the API performs as expected when faced with a variety of requests.
Why API Testing is Needed to Validate SaaS-Based Product
API testing is used to validate SaaS-based products for a number of reasons.
1. Reduced development costs
2. Improves the overall security posture of the SaaS application
3. Increased agility and innovation
6. Test automation
Test automation plays a crucial role in continuously and consistently assessing the quality and reliability of SaaS applications on both a functional and a non-functional basis.
It provides a critically constant quality assessment many times a day across multiple environments and builds of code. It also frees up human testers to work on a more exploratory testing basis where increased numbers of edge case bugs are typically discovered.
Why Test Automation is Needed to Validate SaaS-Based Products
Below are the reasons why test automation is essential for validating SaaS-based products
1. Facilitates Frequent Releases and Updates
2. Increased Scalability
3. Continuously Monitor Application quality
4. Enhanced automatic deployment and test execution for the application.
