"Software has become an integral and crucial part of this modern world. They are used in every business sector and helping people to fulfill their needs with ease. Since the dependency on the software is effectively increasing, it is very crucial for enterprises to enhance the software testing strategies and include testing at each testing method including distributed software. Most of the modern applications are using the distributed software method, where the server of the application is interacting with more than one client. These have many challenges and thus testing becomes crucial for distributed software."
Testing has different approaches and they are classified on their testing methods. Distributed and Non-distributed testing are the two approaches with different principles. Distributed software testing is the method where the testing is practiced on several parts and each of the parts is available on different computers. Distributed software testing is generally needed for intranet sites or web, multi-tier, or client-server applications. Whereas, Non-distributed software testing is an approach where tests are run on single computers that don’t interact with other systems.
Among these two software testing types, distributed software testing has several complexities as it involves testing of client and server parts. It automates the execution of various test cases on different machines and ultimately saves time, human effort in maintaining reports, and test logs. This is the approach most of the web applications depending as they have to rely on mobile applications, desktop applications, and other servers. These arise many challenges and thus it becomes crucial to perform distributed software testing.
Why Distributed Software testing is important?
1. To Avoid the Bugs due to Internal API changes: When running distributed applications, there are several instances where internal API gets changed with the changes made in business requirements. These cause instability among the internal APIs. However, these can be resolved by slowing down the changes, enhancing communication among the teams, and by writing test cases for Internal APIs.
2. To Avoid Communication Gaps: In distributed application, each team is assigned with each component. This is really a good advantage with the distributed systems as they provide the scope for the teams to become expert in one part of the system. But, this way of maintaining soiled teams causes communication issues. However, to mitigate these issues it is important to have self-documenting APIs and a good test suite enabling thorough documentation.
3. To Overcome bad Network Connections: There are no issues related to network connections with server-to-server cases. But, when performing data to a browser or mobile client via an API, it becomes harder to maintain a good connection. To overcome these issues, it is important to add distributed software tests that can regulate the bad connection and help to minimize data losses, etc.
4. To avoid Unexpected breaks due to Third-party APIs: Not every REST API works in a manner to abide by the forms of versioning. These may break when there is a bug fixed and cause breakage in the APIs. This is because of the APIs that are released by many companies publicly. However, these accidental breaks can be prevented from affecting the application by performing distributed software tests.
Conclusion:
Enterprises are constantly upgrading to innovate new products for websites, intranet sites across different browsers. Though this is a great task, it requires several challenges to overcome. And, distributed software testing has aroused as a solution to overcome these challenges by allowing to automate execution on various machines. Distributed test environments have become a major choice as these help to execute parallel tests across different workstations and permitting the test logs to be maintained on several hosts for generating reports.
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