The software development life cycle (SDLC) is composed of various stages. Software testing is an important stage within the software development cycle (SDCL). Different types of testing are employed in each phase beginning with development till it reaches the market. 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.
One variety is software for web applications. 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.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. The software is incomplete at this point and testing is done only for small modules 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.
After the alpha testing is completed the software is permitted to undergo the beta phase of testing. In beta testing the web software I completely built. The software is made available for use to a restricted number of customers intended for software testing previous to the official release. 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 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. Paired-programming is one of the popular methods used by highly qualified technicians to achieve error free coding .
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.
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 used to check if a web-site/application will fail or loss performance under the added pressure of heavy loads or imputs from multiple users log-in, mail servers, etc. 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.
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.
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.
When interative methodology is used to develop software regression testing is crucial. 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.
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