Web Software Testing: Ensuring Web Software Is Functional and Secure

Software for web applications is one variety of software. Web software has gained considerable importance with the advent of Internet which has considerable impact on our daily lives. Most of the security risks originate from Internet and it is essential that the web software is thoroughly tested before releasing to the market.

Although the testing of web software is important, there is always hurry in developing and testing such software. During the design and development of software for web applications, the testing engineers use different groups or types of tests. These are code testing, load testing, compatibility testing, functional testing and regression testing.

The web software is normally released using a pattern of software release called alpha/beta testing. Alpha testing is a simulated or actual operational testing by potential users/customers or an independent test team at the developers' site. At this stage the software is incomplete and testing is done only for small modules of the software. Alpha testing is often employed for off-the-shelf software as a form of internal acceptance testing. Software that has been alpha tested cannot be released until all the major functional parts of the software are coded and tested.

Once the alpha testing stage of development is complete, the software is allowed to get into beta phase of testing. At this stage the web software should be completed fully. The software is released to a limited number of users for software testing before its official release. Since the web site design uses HTML coding, it is easy to integrate individual web pages on site and integrate them easily; hence this alpha/beta method is usually not used for website development. This means that they can build and test one page at a time and after completion they can go onto the next one, with each one independent of the other.

The term code testing means that the software testing or development engineer examines the codes for the presence of software bugs. It is essential that the software is bug free because the process of web development is very fast. One of the popular methods used for error free coding by highly qualified techs is called paired-programming.

Paired programming is a software development technique in which two programmers work together at one keyboard. The driver types in code while the observer or navigator reviews each line of code as it is being typed. The logic behind adopting this methodology is as follows. According to The Economist, "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 software is tested repeatedly as the development process goes on and by the time of final release it is bug free. Load testing is carried out against heavy loads or inputs such as multiple user log-in, mail servers etc. to find out at what point the web-site/application fails or at what point its performance degrades. The testing will document the number of users the site will support at the same time, the amount of transactions it will handle and the response time under different conditions or flows of traffic.

Compatibility testing is done to evaluate the application compatibility with the computing environment like operating system, database, browser compatibility, backwards compatibility, computing capacity of the hardware platform and compatibility of the peripherals.

Functional testing validates for conformation to its specifications and correctly performs all its required functions. This involves conducting a series of tests which perform a feature by feature validation of behavior, using a wide range of normal and erroneous input data. Regression testing is done to ensure that enhancement, defect fixes or any other changes made to the software have not broken any existing functionality.

Regression testing is very important wherever there is iterative development of software. In iterative development, the developer adds another module with some functionality to the existing running module and one should make sure that addition of this module does not break the existing functionality. Regression testing is performed with the goal of discovering regression bugs. The above tests are necessary to complete the web software testing.