Testing SaaS applications — everything that enterprises should know

Enterprises adopt a myriad of SaaS applications to accelerate their processes and improve their business capabilities. In today's digital landscape, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications have become the backbone of many businesses, offering scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. According to Gartner, SaaS applications will witness continued growth of up to 16.8% in 2023. As the demand for enterprise SaaS applications continues to rise, it is essential to ensure that these applications meet the highest quality and performance standards. Nonetheless, the complexity keeps increasing as businesses attempt to customize and integrate solutions to suit their requirements precisely. This article covers the importance of testing SaaS applications across enterprises and strategies that testers, product teams, SREs, and QA engineers require to deliver reliable, efficient, and high-performing SaaS solutions.

What are SaaS applications?

Enterprise SaaS applications are cloud-based software solutions that cater to business specific-needs of organizations across various industries. These applications bring to the table a wide range of functionalities, including customer relationship management, project management, human resources management, and more. As businesses heavily rely on these applications, any functional or performance issues can significantly impact productivity and customer satisfaction.

Why should enterprises test their SaaS applications?

Testing enterprise SaaS applications is crucial to identify and mitigate potential risks, ensuring a seamless user experience. The following are the primary reasons why these SaaS applications should be tested:

1. Scalability: SaaS applications can quickly scale to accommodate the growing needs of businesses, allowing organizations to add or remove users and features as required.
2. Flexibility: SaaS applications offer flexibility in terms of accessibility, as these can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection and across various devices.
3. Detecting defects: When implemented early in a product's life cycle, testing aids in identifying high-priority defects and issues. It helps ensure that the application is bug-free or error-free. Early bug detection helps save money and resources. Hence, it is more crucial to implement the changes and make adjustments to the application while it is still being developed than it is to update it after the app is released for production.
4. Cost-efficiency: SaaS applications eliminate the need for businesses to invest heavily in infrastructure, maintenance, and updates, as these responsibilities lie with the SaaS provider.
5. Continuous updates: SaaS applications are regularly updated by the provider, ensuring that businesses have access to the latest features and security patches.

What are the challenges enterprises face in testing SaaS applications?

Testing enterprise SaaS applications presents unique challenges, such as:

• Multi-tenant architecture: SaaS applications typically follow a multi-tenant architecture, where multiple customers share the same application instance. Testing in such an environment requires thorough validation to ensure data separation and prevent issues caused by one tenant's actions affecting others.
• Integration complexity: SaaS applications often integrate with various third-party services, APIs, and databases. Testing the integration points becomes critical to ensure seamless communication and data flow.
• Customization options: SaaS applications may offer customization options for different customers. Testing should encompass these customization scenarios to verify their proper functioning and compatibility with the core application.
• Finding the right SaaS testing tool: While applications are diverse and the complexities in processes increase, organizations find it challenging to find the SaaS testing tool that rightly fits their needs to ensure the optimal performance of the apps.

HeadSpin's role in testing enterprise SaaS applications

HeadSpin is a global omnichannel testing platform that enables enterprises to test a wide range of apps on-premise as well as on the cloud securely and capture critical KPIs to optimize app performance and digital experiences. By leveraging HeadSpin's robust device infrastructure and advanced data science capabilities, organizations can test on a wide array of real devices and proactively identify and fix high-priority issues. HeadSpin's data science driven Platform helps enterprises collaborate easily across teams, including Engineering, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams, to seamlessly execute manual and automated tests to improve app performance and digital experiences. By leveraging HeadSpin's robust device infrastructure and advanced data science capabilities, organizations can test on a wide array of real devices and capture critical KPIs that impact end-user experiences.

HeadSpin's unique capabilities that help test SaaS applications and ensure optimized user experiences include:

• AI driven analytics: HeadSpin helps enterprises analyze real-time performance data captured through test sessions and automatically surface issues and their root causes. The Platform helps obtain deep AI generated insights with actionable recommendations that enable teams to make required improvements to the app and ensure a superior end-user experience.
• Multiple deployment options: HeadSpin allows organizations to securely test applications in the cloud by allowing them to remotely access real devices through the global device infrastructure. The cloud deployment model helps isolate customer services, data, devices, configuration, and hosts to a private subnet and restricts access to the subnet. The Platform secures the process as no public IPs except the OpenVPN tunnel between the customer and HeadSpin are open.
• Real device testing: HeadSpin's secure device infrastructure allows enterprises to access thousands of real SIM-enabled devices and test a wide range of SaaS applications. This capability allows testing and product teams to test across a wide range of real user scenarios. Furthermore, with the global device infrastructure HeadSpin allows to perform geolocation testing on real devices that covers the apps against any geography-dependent factors and ensures optimal performance.
• User experience monitoring and performance optimization: HeadSpin's data science capabilities help identify high-priority issues and recommend solutions with issue cards to improve app performance and user experience. The Platform enables teams to capture hundreds of KPIs around devices, apps, OSs, and networks and offer customized solutions to cater to specific business requirements. With HeadSpin, enterprises are able to perform peer benchmarking and edge in the industry over their competitors.

In a nutshell

Testing enterprise SaaS applications requires a comprehensive approach that covers functional, performance, security, and compatibility testing. Test automation, continuous testing, and monitoring are essential practices to ensure the quality, reliability, and user satisfaction of SaaS applications. By implementing the best practices and leveraging tools like HeadSpin, organizations can deliver high-quality SaaS applications to cater to user demands and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

Source: https://www.headspin.io/blog/testing-saas-applications-across-enterprises