The software development life cycle (SDLC) is composed of various stages. Software performance testing is one of the most essential stages. There are different testing types and they are useful at different stages of the software development cycle. 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.
Software for web applications is one type of software. With the advancements in Internet and its high impact on our day to day life, web software has achieved high importance in software industry and 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.
The time available to develop and test web software is always limited. While the web software is being designed and developed it is also being tested by the testings engineers using different types of tests. 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.This is a simulated or actual operational test conducted by potential users or an independent test team at the developers’ site. Because during alpha testing the software is actually still being developed only small modules of the software are tested during this stage. Alpha testing is frequently employed for off-the-shelf software as a method of internal acceptance testing. Software that passed the alpha test will not be released till all the major functionalities of the software are built and tested.
Beta testing is done by a limited amount of users that can use the software before its official release takes place. 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.
Code testing refers to the process where the testing or development engineer verifies the code and make sure that there are no 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. The driver types in the code while the observer or navigator reviews each line. 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. 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 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.
