Web Software Testing: Ensuring Web Software Security and Functionality
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). A variety of testing methods are used beginning with the application’s development until it gets the marketing stage. 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. The importance of this type of software has increased rapidly since the arrival of the Internet. 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 standanrd pattern for the realease of web software consists of two main stages, alpha and 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 has been alpha tested cannot be released until all the major functional parts have been coded and tested.
Beta testing is done by a limited amount of users that can use the software before its official release takes place. The alpha/beta testing method is not the standard procedure when testing web site design. This imply that it is possible to build and test one page at a time and later go to the next one with independent testing for each one.
In code testing the software testing or development engineer examines the codes for 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.
Paired programming is a software development method in which two programmers work together at one keyboard. One programmer types in the code when the other person observes and reviews each line at the same time. 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 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 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 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 The Regression testing the type of testing done to make sure that improvement, defect corrections or any additional changes to the software has not broken down 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. Regression testing is done to find out any of such instances. The above mentioned methods are essential tests to complete the web software testing.
