Web Software Testing: Guarantee that the Web Software is purposeful and safe

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. 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. 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. The software is incomplete at this point and testing is done only for small modules 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.

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.

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. A popular method used by experienced programmers for bug free coding is the paired-programming.

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. 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.

As the development process continues the software is tested repeatedly. By the time it’s finally released the software is free of bugs. 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. 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.

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 confirms its specifications and accurately performs all of the required tasks. This involves doing a series of tests that perform a feature by feature validation of behavior, utilizing a wide range of normal and erroneous input 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 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. Regression testing is done to find out any of such instances. The above mentioned methods are essential tests to complete the web software testing.

Web Software Testing: Guarantee that the Web Software is purposeful and safe

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