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. These methods are employed during various stages of the SDLC. Moreover there are different varieties of the software that needs to be tested before it is released to the costumer.
There are many different classes of software and software for web applications is one of them. 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. 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.
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 web software is usually released using a pattern 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. The software is incomplete at this point and testing is done only for small modules of the software. When of-the-self software is employed, alpha testing is often used as an internal acceptance test. 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. 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 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.
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. The developer typing the code is called the driver while the programmer that checks every line of code as it is produced is called the observer or the navigator. 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 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 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. 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.
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 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 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 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. All the types of test mentioned above are necessary to provide complete web software testing.
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