Web Software Testing

Posted by tomgreen on December 30, 2009

The software development life cycle (SDLC) is composed of various stages. Software testing is an important stage within the software development cycle (SDCL). A variety of testing methods are used beginning with the application’s development until it gets the marketing stage. These methods are employed during various stages of the SDLC. In addition, all the different versions of the software have to be tested before they are delivered to either the costumer or the target market.

One variety is software for web applications. 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.

The time available to develop and test web software is always limited. While the web software is being designed and developed it is also being tested by the testings engineers using different types of tests. In the design and development stages, testing engineers utilize different groups or types of tests such as code testing, load testing, compatibility testing, functional testing and regression testing.

The web software is usually released using a pattern of software release known as alpha/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. This testing will be upon incomplete software and will be tested for small parts of the software.Alpha testing is often used for ready to use software as a type of in-house 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 imply that it is possible to build and test one page at a time and later go to the next one with independent testing for each one.

In code testing the software testing or development engineer examines the codes for 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 favourite methods that highly qualified testers can use to produce bug free coding.

The Paired programming is a method in software development where two programmers work simultaneously 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.”

The fact that the software is tested many times during the development process should provide a bug free software by the end of it. Load testing is used to check if a web-site/application will fail or loss performance under the added pressure of heavy loads or imputs from multiple users log-in, mail servers, etc. The testing documents the number of users the site will support simultaneously, the number of transactions it can handle and its response time under various conditions or traffic flows.

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. In this type of development, the developer adds another module with some functionality to the existing module that’s running. One should make sure that adding this module does not ruin the existing functionality. All the types of test mentioned above are necessary to provide complete web software testing.

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