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). A variety of testing methods are used beginning with the application’s development until it gets the marketing stage. From the initial development of the application until it reaches the maketing phase different testing types will be used. Moreover there are different varieties of the software that needs to be tested before it is released to the costumer.
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. Most security risks come from Internet. Therefore it’s crucial to test the software thoroughly prior to releasing it on the market.
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. Software that has been alpha tested cannot be released until all the major functional parts have been coded and tested.
After the alpha testing is completed the software is permitted to undergo the beta phase of testing. In beta testing the web software I completely built. The software is made available for use to a restricted number of customers intended for software testing previous to the official release. 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.
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. A popular method used by experienced programmers for bug free coding is the paired-programming.
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 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. This type of testing will help to arrive at statistics such as how many users the site will sustain at the same time, the quantity of communication it will hold and the reaction time under various circumstances.
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 asses the alignment between the application and its specifications checking that it provides all the required functions. To do that an extense range of both normal and erronous data will be imput to validate the behaviour caused by each of the software features Regression testing is carried out to check that any changes made to the code in order to enhance it or to fix defects has not affected any functionality.
Regression testing is very important whenever there’s iterative development of software. In iterative programming, new modules are added to the core module to increase the functionality provided by the application, this needs to be done with the certainty that the added module does not affect the original functionality of the running module. All the types of test mentioned above are necessary to provide complete web software testing.