Article 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 customer.
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. Most security risks come from Internet. Therefore it’s crucial to test the software thoroughly prior to releasing it on the market.
While web software testing is important, there’s always a rush in developing and testing it. 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 web software is usually released by means of a model of software release known as alpha/beta testing. Alpha testing is a replicated or real ready testing by would-be users/customers or a separate testing team on the developers’ location. This testing will be upon incomplete software and will be tested for small parts of the software. Alpha testing is often used for ready to use software as a type of in-house acceptance testing. 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. 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.
The Paired programming is a method in software development where two programmers work simultaneously at one keyboard. One programmer types in the code when the other person observes and reviews each line at the same time. 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.”
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 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.
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 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. 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.
