HCI Lab

There are various phases in software development life cycle (SDLC).Software testing is one of the most essential stages. 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. In addition, all the different versions of the software have to be tested before they are delivered to either the costumer or the target market.

Software for web applications is one type of software. 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.

While web software testing is important, there’s always a rush in developing and testing it. 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 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. When of-the-self software is employed, alpha testing is often used as an internal acceptance test. After being alpha tested software will only be released when all the main functional sections have been both 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. Since the web site design uses HTML coding, it’s easy to integrate individual web pages on site; hence the alpha/beta method is usually 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. Because the time involved in web development is small it is important that the software is free of bugs. Paired-programming is one of the favourite methods that highly qualified testers can use to produce bug 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. This strategy is appealing because fewer bugs are produced. 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 fact that the software is tested many times during the development process should provide a bug free software by the end of it. 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. The testing documents the number of users the site will support simultaneously, the number of transactions it can handle and its response time under various conditions or traffic flows.

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 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. In iterative programming, new modules are added to the core module to increase the functionality provided by the application, this needs to be done with the certainty that the added module does not affect the original functionality of the running module. Regression testing is done to find out any of such instances. The above mentioned methods are essential tests to complete the web software testing.