Who’ll Stop the Rain: Seeking Quality in the Cloud

Posted By Jonathan Bloom on May 5, 2011 | Application Quality

It’s nearly impossible these days to pick up a trade publication covering the tech industry without reading something about cloud computing. The plethora of coverage is enough to make one think that cloud computing is the latest technological panacea, good for everything from live data storage to data archiving and all enterprise needs in between.

Spending on cloud solutions also bears out its popularity. Late last year, Ian Song, senior research analyst for IDC’s Enterprise Virtualization Software program, placed global spending on cloud initiatives in 2009 at roughly $17 billion.  He predicted this figure would rise at an average annual rate of 26 percent and reach $44.2 billion by 2013 – nearly a three-fold increase!

David Linthicum, CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs and a blog contributor at Forbes.com, calls what is taking place a “migration to cloud computing” and says for enterprises in the modern era it is “ultimately a matter of survival.”

What is particularly interesting about Linthicum’s account is his noting that this migration is happening as much from the ground up, being experimented with inside of corporate projects, as it is coming as a directive from the executive boardroom. Linthicum postulates:

…you can consider the migration to cloud as coming in two directions: Bottom up from the projects, and top down from IT leadership that’s strapped for cash. Figure they will meet in the middle sometime around the end of next year; IT leadership will adopt cloud once it’s been proven at the project levels, and the core driver will be cost.

Reducing Static

While enterprises are starting to become more amenable to cloud solutions, cloud computing has been, since its inception, a wise choice among smaller companies who see the use of “software as a service” as a way to reduce costs, while allowing for future expansion and scalability. Along the same lines, cloud computing could be a useful tool to assist in the structural analysis of application software.

Automated analysis and measurement – arguably the best solution for assessing structural quality of application software – has historically been seen as the province of larger enterprises and development teams where multiple hands are writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code. What of the smaller software companies, mobile app developers or even the independent developers? They, too, could derive benefit from the ability to perform static analysis of their software or customization projects.

A Silver Lining

A cloud portal version of automated analysis and measurement could be the “silver lining” for the smaller developers and companies looking to improve upon the structural quality of their software. For them, such a portal would give them the ability to run their applications through a cloud-based portal to detect structural flaws and test them for the key health factors of application software quality: security, changeability, transferability, robustness and performance. A cloud portal version of automated analysis and measurement would also be a boon for mobile developers, not to mention app stores, who could ensure their smartphone end users that the software they were downloading to their devices is safe and robust.

Whatever way you float it, the sky could be the limit for cloud computing and its ability to yield QaaS – QUALITY as a service.

Tags: Application Quality, automated analysis and measurement, cloud computing, cloud migration, SaaS, Software, Software Development, software measurement, structural quality