Web Software Testing: Ensuring Web Software Security and Functionality
The software development life cycle (SDLC) is composed of various stages. Software performance testing is one of the significant phases within the software development cycle (SDCL). There are different testing types and they are useful at different stages of the software development cycle. 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.
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.Alpha testing is a replicated or real ready testing by would-be users/customers or a separate testing team on the developers’ location. Because during alpha testing the software is actually still being developed only small modules of the software are tested during this stage. When of-the-self software is employed, alpha testing is often used as an internal acceptance test. 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. 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.
Two coders working at a single workstation it is at the core of paired programming. The driver types in the code while the observer or navigator reviews each line. 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 software is tested repeatedly. By the time it’s finally released the software 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.
The testing done to estimate the compatibility of the application with the different interacting hardware of software is the Compatibility testing. This method tests how good the software is in interactions with operating system, peripherals, database, browser etc. It also tests the computing capacity of the hardware platform and 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. 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. 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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