Test Plan Generation for Live Testing of Cloud Services

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated approach for generating test plans to safely conduct live testing of cloud services in production environments, reducing manual effort and minimizing service disruptions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for automating test plan creation specifically tailored for live cloud service testing, addressing complexity and error-proneness.

Findings

Automated test plan generation reduces manual effort.

The approach minimizes service disruptions during live testing.

Case study demonstrates effectiveness of the method.

Abstract

Live testing is performed in the production environment ideally without causing unacceptable disturbance to the production traffic. Thus, test activities have to be orchestrated properly to avoid interferences with the production traffic. A test plan is the road map that specifies how the test activities need to be orchestrated. Developing a test plan includes tasks such as test configuration selection/generation, test configuration deployment planning, creating the test runs schedule, choosing strategies to mitigate the risk of interferences, etc. The manual design of a test plan is tedious and error prone. This task becomes harder especially when the systems are large and complex. In this paper we propose an approach for automating test plans generation. With this approach we aim at reducing service disruption that may be induced by the testing activities in production. We illustrate our approach with a case study and discuss its different aspects.