July 30, 2010

Web Software Testing: Ensuring Web Software Security And Functionality

The development life cycle contains numerous stages. Software testing is an important stage within the 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. The itself also comes in different varieties, which all require testing before they’re released on the market.

One variety is for web applications. With the advancements in Internet and its high impact on our day to day life, web has achieved high importance in 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 is carefully tested prior to releasing to the costumer.

The time available to develop and test web is always limited. While the web 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 web is usually released using a pattern of release known as alpha/beta testing.This is a simulated or actual operational test conducted by potential users or an independent test team at the developers’ site. This testing will be upon incomplete and will be tested for small parts of the .Alpha testing is often used for ready to use as a type of in-house acceptance testing. that passed the alpha test will not be released till all the major functionalities of the are built and tested.

Beta testing is done by a limited amount of users that can use the before its official release takes place. 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.

When testers or development engineers are code testing they are checking for the presence of bugs. Web development is a very rapid process so the abscence of bugs is required. 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. The judgment behind taking up this method is the following. The Economist proclaims that, “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.”

As the development process continues the is tested repeatedly. By the time it’s finally released the 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. 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 compatibility with the 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 has not broken down any existing functionality.

Regression testing is very important whenever there’s iterative development of . 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. Regression testing is done to find out any of such instances. The above mentioned methods are essential tests to complete the web testing.

Tags

Related posts

Filed under Affiliate Programs by

Permalink Print