Agaric — A hybrid cloud based testing platform

Cloud computing technology enables developers spend much more time on application quality without considering computing resource constraint, load balancing and performance tuning, etc. It raises challenges along with the benefits it offers to software testing. This paper is motivated with the concerns on how to test the online web applications in a scalable and diverse way. The resources occupied in the proposed cloud testing are diverse in computing ability, network performance, and software configuration (including operating system and browser, etc.). This paper at first identifies the eight unique features to define cloud testing. Then, this paper introduces the design of Agaric - hybrid cloud based testing platform. In Agaric we use both the diverse internet distributed and user owned computing resources, and the centered computing resources. The key to organize the test network is the proposed Test Flow Control Protocol (TFCP). TFCP is verified formally with Colored Petri Net and the platform is evaluated with both controlled and uncontrolled experiments.