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Web Software Testing: Ensuring Web Software Functionality

By: John Hansen

There are various phases in software development life cycle (SDLC). On of the significant phases among this is software testing. Different types of testing are employed in each phase beginning with development till it reaches the market. The testing spans over all the stages in the SDLC. Moreover there are different varieties of the software that needs to be tested before it is released to the costumer.

Software for web applications is one type of software. 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. 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.

Even though the testing of web software is vital, there is at all times rush in building and testing those application due to time constraints. 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. This is a simulated or actual operational test conducted by potential users or an independent test team at the developers' site. The software is incomplete at this point and testing is done only for small modules of the software. Alpha testing is frequently employed for off-the-shelf software as a method of internal acceptance testing. Software that has been alpha tested cannot be released until all the major functional parts have been coded and tested.

After the alpha testing stage is finished, the software advances to the beta phase of testing. The web software should be fully completed by now. The software is released to a restricted number of users for testing before it is officially released. 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.

In code testing the software testing or development engineer examines the codes for software bugs. It's essential for the software to be free of bugs because the web development process is very quick. Paired-programming is one of the popular methods used by highly qualified technicians to achieve error free coding.

Two coders working at a single workstation it is at the core of paired programming. The developer typing the code is called the driver while the programmer that checks every line of code as it is produced is called the observer or the navigator. 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 fact that the software is tested many times during the development process should provide bug free software by the end of it. Load testing is used to check if a web-site/application will fail or loss performance under the added pressure of heavy loads or inputs from multiple users log-in, mail servers, etc. Load testing will provide information regarding the amount of users that could connect simultaneously to a site, the number of transactions that the system can cope at the same time and its responsiveness under different circumstances or amount of traffic.

Compatibility testing needs to be carried out to asses the software compatibility with the software and hardware that it may interact with. This includes testing compatibility with operating systems, database, browsers, peripherals and backwards compatibility.

The testing used to validate the conformance to specifications and requirements is the Functional testing. This testing involves performing a sequence of tests to validate the behavior of the software, feature by feature using a large number of normal and abnormal 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.

Regression testing is an important testing method when the software development method is iterative. 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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Software Testing Basics cover the basic steps for software testing. Check our site for additional information on software testing. For example Black Box Testing tests without knowledge of the code.





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