Enabling automated integration testing of cloud application services in virtualized environments

Software development under the cloud computing model brings the advantage that new applications can be rapidly constructed by tailoring existing services. However, the use of Internet-based services as software components, leads to the development of applications in which some building blocks are hosted remotely, rather than locally in a controlled environment. This aspect of cloud-based development, when coupled with factors such as service autonomy, complexity, and high dependability criteria, make software testing of the cloud especially 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 automation, typically built to validate a cloud service 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 using controlled virtual environments. To facilitate continued evaluation of our approach, we have implemented a prototype of TSaaS that is compatible with the Windows Azure platform.