What’s the big deal with software-as-a-service? (and why is MaxTAF bringing it to test automation)

Getting the right tools to support test automation is a critical consideration to achieve good test coverage efficiently. 

Elsewhere in the professional world, cloud softwares (aka software as a service), have been growing in popularity by helping teams to achieve their mission goals without wasting time on maintaining the tools to do so. Test teams should also consider the same to improve their efficiency. 

Read on to learn more about SaaS and how a SaaS platform like MaxTAF can help lower costs and save time for test automation teams. 

What is SaaS (software-as-a-service)?

Simply put, with traditional software, you buy, install, maintain and update them on your local computer, and it is more of an upfront investment. In contrast, SaaS products are (almost always) paid for under a subscription model, they are hosted by the supplier and accessed via the web. This effectively makes the SaaS software more in line with a paid service than an investment of capital. 

MaxTAF follows this model, allowing automation engineers to ditch their local IDEs, their home grown infrastructures and any other tools they use to support their automation, and streamline the process into one, consolidated, maintenance free platform for everything. 

What are the advantages of SaaS compared with traditional softwares?

No large upfront costs allows for a more honest investigation of the tool

By purchasing under a subscription model, adopting a SaaS technology is an inherently lower investment affair when compared with traditional software purchasing. 

Many SaaS products, MaxTAF included, have a ‘pay-as-you-use’ pricing model, which allows organisations to try out different parts of the software at relatively low expense and make a more informed decision about how they want to invest in and use the software. 

Lower effort investment

Adopting, refining, expanding and maintaining tooling on local computers across a larger team is a challenge that is resolved by adopting a SaaS platform. 

With a tool like MaxTAF, everything you need is delivered the second you sign up, works reliably and is continuously updated and improved behind the scenes, allowing teams to get on with their testing objectives and spend less time trying to achieve the optimal tool stack. 

Feature complete and integrated platform. 

Often test teams have to integrate a wide variety of tools and services to make their test regime work efficiently. An example of this could be integrating a framework into maven, which then runs tests against a selenium grid, which is distributing to an internal server network. 

Integrating these things takes hefty amounts of time and expertise in a wide variety of technical fields to get right, which ultimately results in higher overheads for implementing test automation.

None of this is a problem for MaxTAF users, who benefit from a feature complete, frictionlessly integrated platform with dozens of useful test tools, large and small, to assist in achieving good test coverage in a short space of time. 

Who is SaaS for?

Hopefully the points above should indicate that adopting a SaaS platform like MaxTAF could be an excellent route for any individual, team or organisation. 

The advantage of SaaS is a universal one - it removes the effort of setting anything up, it simplifies, integrates and consolidates many tools into one streamlined platform, and ultimately it allows teams to get on with their mission objectives without distraction.

What makes MaxTAF unique compared to other SaaS test tools?

MaxTAF is a perfect option for teams that use Selenium and are considering a SaaS tool to help improve their operational efficiency. For testers, MaxTAF is designed to help automators get on with automating while saving time and reducing costs. Here are three areas where MaxTAF is unique compared to other cloud testing tools. 

It’s a fully fledged IDE, with all popular languages covered
Other cloud tools include their own proprietary technologies to assist with test development - this has the disadvantage of committing the test team to that tool forever, else they face losing their hard work when they drop the tool. 

MaxTAF is an alternative, and really it’s a fully fledged IDE designed for Selenium testers, and supports Selenium development much better than a regular IDE would.

With languages choices of Java, Python, C# and Javascript supported, as well as the ability to include any other open source library in those languages into your scripts, MaxTAF is perfect for anyone who wants to adopt the power of the most widely used open source test automation technology in the world.

Powerful Infrastructure provided
MaxTAF provides an extensive grid of Selenium nodes to enable the scalable running of tests in parallel. 
This grid is powered by AWS, making the network almost infinitely expandable to fit your needs.

Features designed exclusively for test engineers
Unlike any other IDE used to develop Selenium, MaxTAF is designed with features and integrations to make a tester’s life more productive, not just a software developer’s.
Scheduling, reporting, parameters, live views, hierarchical suites and more are all included and optimized for test development.