Web Software Testing: Guarantee that the Web Software is purposeful and safe
There are various phases in software development life cycle (SDLC). Software testing is an important stage within the software development cycle (SDCL). Different types of testing are employed in each phase beginning with development till it reaches the market. These methods are employed during various stages of the SDLC. The software itself also comes in different varieties, which all require testing before they’re released on the market.
Software for web applications is one type of software. The importance of this type of software has increased rapidly since the arrival of the Internet. 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. The different types of tests can be grouped in 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. Because during alpha testing the software is actually still being developed only small modules of the software are tested during this stage. Software that has been alpha tested cannot be released until all the major functional parts have been coded and tested.
Beta testing is done by a limited amount of users that can use the software before its official release takes place. The alpha/beta testing method is not the standard procedure when testing web site design. 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.
When software testers or development engineers are code testing they are checking for the presence of 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.
Two coders working at a single workstation it is at the core of paired programming. One programmer types in the code when the other person observes and reviews each line at the same time. 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 testing process continues through out the software development cycle so that at the time of final release it is free of bugs. 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 evaluates the application’s compatibility with the computing environment like the operating system, database, browser compatibility, backwards compatibility, computing capacity of the hardware platform and compatibility of the peripherals.
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 done to find out any of such instances. The above mentioned methods are essential tests to complete the web software testing.
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