Web Software Testing: Guarantee That The Web Software Is Purposeful And Safe

There are various phases in software development life cycle (SDLC). Software testing is one of the significant phases within the software development cycle (SDCL). 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. The software itself also comes in different varieties, which all require testing before they’re released on the market.

There are many different classes of software and software for web applications is one of them. 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.

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.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. 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. The alpha/beta testing method is not the standard procedure when testing web site design. 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.

Code testing refers to the process where the testing or development engineer verifies the code and make sure that there are no 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 favourite methods that highly qualified testers can use to produce bug free coding.

The Paired programming is a method in software development where two programmers work simultaneously 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. 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 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. Load testing will provide information regarding the amount of users that could connect simustaneosly 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.

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 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 performed to ensure that enhancements, defect repairs or other changes to the software have not disrupted any existing 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. Regression testing is done to find out any of such instances. The above mentioned methods are essential tests to complete the web software testing.