Web Software Testing: Guarantee that the Web Software is purposeful and safe
The software development life cycle contains numerous stages. Software performance testing is one of the most essential stages. 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. The software itself also comes in different varieties, which all require testing before they’re released on the market.
One variety is software for web applications. 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. Because of the high impact Internet has on our daily lives any web software is carefully tested before launching in order to reduce the associated security risks that originate from the use of the Internet.
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. In the design and development stages, testing engineers utilize different groups or types of tests such as 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.This is a simulated or actual operational test conducted by potential users or an independent test team at the developers’ site. 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 often used for ready to use software as a type of in-house acceptance testing. After being alpha tested software will only be released when all the main functional sections have been both 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. 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 software testers or development engineers are code testing they are checking for the presence of software bugs. It’s essential for the software to be free of bugs because the web development process is very quick. A popular method used by experienced programmers for bug free coding is the paired-programming.
Paired programming is a software development method in which two programmers work together at one keyboard. 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. 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.”
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 performed against heavy loads or inputs such as multiple user log-ins and mail servers to determine the point at which the web-site/application fails or the point when performance degrades. 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 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. 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. 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. All the types of test mentioned above are necessary to provide complete web software testing.
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