Web Software Testing: Guarantee that the Web Software is purposeful and safe
Posted by Guest on February 21st, 2010
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The software development life cycle (SDLC) is composed of various stages. Software performance testing is one of the most essential stages. Different types of testing are employed in each phase beginning with development till it reaches the market. From the initial development of the application until it reaches the maketing phase different testing types will be used. 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. With the advent of the Internet web software has significantly increased in importance, as the Internet has had a substantial impact on 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.
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 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. Because during alpha testing the software is actually still being developed only small modules of the software are tested during this stage. Alpha testing is frequently employed for off-the-shelf software as a method of internal acceptance testing. Software that passed the alpha test will not be released till all the major functionalities of the software are built and tested.
Beta testing is done by a limited amount of users that can use the software before its official release takes place. Since the web site design uses HTML coding, it’s easy to integrate individual web pages on site; hence the alpha/beta method is usually not used for website development This means they can build and test one page at a time. After completion they can move onto the next one, with each page independent of each other.
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 popular methods used by highly qualified technicians to achieve error free coding .
The Paired programming is a method in software development where two programmers work simultaneously at one keyboard. One programmer types in the code when the other person observes and reviews each line at the same time. Support for this methodology is provided by some research data produced by Laurie Williams at University of Utah in Salt Lake City. According to this research paired programmers produce code with 15% less bugs while only being 15% slower than individual programmers.
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 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 an important testing method when the software development method is iterative. 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.
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