Web Software Testing
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008The software development life cycle contains numerous stages. Software performance testing is one of the most essential stages. Different types of testing are employed in each phase beginning with development till it reaches the market. The testing spans over all the stages in the SDLC. The software itself also comes in different varieties, which all require testing before they’re released on the market.
There are many different classes of software and software for web applications is one of them. With the advancements in Internet and its high impact on our day to day life, web software has achieved high importance in software industry and our daily lives. The majority of the security threats start off from Internet and it is necessary to make sure that the web software is carefully tested prior to releasing to the costumer.
While web software testing is important, there’s always a rush in developing and testing it.There are different methods that the test engineers use to test this software. They are code testing, [load testing], compatibility testing, functional testing and regression testing.
The standanrd pattern for the realease of web software consists of two main stages, alpha and beta testing.The first stage or alpha testing takes place at the developers’ site where either potential users/customers or a purposely created indepent test team will interact with a simulated or actual operational version of the software being tested. The software is incomplete at this point and testing is done only for small modules of the software. Alpha testing is frequently employed for off-the-shelf software as a method of internal acceptance testing. Software that passed the alpha test will not be released till all the major functionalities of the software are built and tested.
After the alpha testing stage is finished, the software advances to the beta phase of testing. The web software should be fully completed by now. The software is released to a restricted number of users for testing before it is officially released. In case of website design it is easy to put together the various pages as the website design uses HTML. So the alpha/beta technique is generally not used for website development. This is because HTML coding makes it very easy to design independent web pages that can afterwards being easily integrated so the design team can code and test each page independently.
Code testing refers to the process where the testing or development engineer verifies the code and make sure that there are no software bugs. Because the time involved in web development is small it is important that the software is free of bugs. Paired-programming is one of the popular methods used by highly qualified technicians to achieve error free coding .
Paired programming is a software development method in which two programmers work together at one keyboard. The developer typing the code is called the driver while the programmer that checks every line of code as it is produced is called the observer or the navigator. This strategy is appealing because fewer bugs are produced. According to The Economist, “Laurie Williams of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City has shown that paired programmers are only 15% slower than two independent individual programmers, but produce 15% fewer bugs.â€
As the development process continues the software is tested repeatedly. By the time it’s finally released the software is free of bugs. Load testing is done to see at what point the application fails or the performance reduces when under heavy loads such as multiple users on or heavy server traffic. Load testing will provide information regarding the amount of users that could connect simustaneosly to a site, the number of transactions that the system can cope at the same time and its responsiveness under different circumstances or amount of traffic.
Compatibility testing needs to be carried out to asses the software compatibility with the software and hardware that it may interact with. This includes testing compatibility with operating systems, database, browsers, peripherals and backwards compatibility.
Functional testing confirms its specifications and accurately performs all of the required tasks. This involves doing a series of tests that perform a feature by feature validation of behavior, utilizing a wide range of normal and erroneous input data. The Regression testing the type of testing done to make sure that improvement, defect corrections or any additional changes to the software has not broken down any existing functionality.
When interative methodology is used to develop software regression testing is crucial. Iterative software development is a method in which new functionality is added to existing software. In this case one should make sure that the new addition has not affected any of the existing functionality. Regression testing is performed for the purpose of discovering regression bugs. The above tests are essential for completing web software testing.