Everything SQA

Source ReadWriteWeb.

It looks like the cloud is improving with a Premium Service from Amazon. Amazon is offering a monthly $100 fee for hands-on care taking from their support teams. Maybe this will lessen the impact when things go down with arbitrary consequence. Not to sound like I’m mocking the effort, I’m a firm supporter of SaaS and a big evangelist for doing more and more business in the cloud. This is some great news from Amazon, and I think it’s a good service for those dsicerning start-ups who are taking advantage of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), or Simple Queue Service (SQS).

In a related post on Ostatic, Sam Dean posts that SaaS may surpass the need to worry over source code, since the software as a service is managed remotely, as quoted…

“There have been strong signs recently that open source has a promising place in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) arena. Alistair Croll, in a post over on GigaOm.com, has a good discussion of how irrelevant source code itself can become in the world of software-driven services.”

It will be interesting to see how we all evolve with this change as more and more start-ups begin implementing SaaS with third party API’s, third party hosting, crowdsourced solutions, etc. I don’t think that the need for QA will change in either way. Functional, uasability acceptance, and performance issues will still be investigated and tested, even with the knowledge that SaaS implements the same type of application with less overhead. And with all that said, I didn’t even cover the concerns related around security.

Bottomline: Even If you’re developing your next killer application on CogHead - you will still need it tested.