Web Software Testing

The software development life cycle (SDLC) is composed of various stages. Software 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. 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. The importance of this type of software has increased rapidly since the arrival of the Internet.  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.

While web software testing is important, there’s always a rush in developing and testing it. 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.This is a simulated or actual operational test conducted by potential users or an independent test team at the developers’ site. This testing will be upon incomplete software and will be tested for small parts of the software. 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. 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 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. Web development is a very rapid process so the abscence of bugs is required. 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. 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.”

The fact that the software is tested many times during the development process should provide a bug free software by the end of it. Load testing is done to see at what point the application fails or the performance reduces when under heavy loads such as multiple users on or heavy server traffic. This type of testing will help to arrive at statistics such as how many users the site will sustain at the same time, the quantity of communication it will hold and the reaction time under various circumstances.

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.

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 performed to ensure that enhancements, defect repairs or other changes to the software have not disrupted any existing functionality.

Regression testing is very important whenever there’s iterative development of software. 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. All the types of test mentioned above are necessary to provide complete web software testing.