We’re living in an era of internet at it’s peak. For anything and everything we depend on information from internet these days. Websites are an integral part of all kinds of small to large businesses. These websites should be functional, informative, user friendly and reliable as it is supposed to. Hence, Testing is a must have activity to make sure your website meets all these qualities. Testing a Web Application is known as Web Testing. With this in mind, let’s deep dive into various approaches of web application testing.
Approaches in web testing
The following are the important web testing approaches in web application development:
1. Functionality Testing
Functionality testing is a critical aspect of web application development, which involves testing, that different features are functional. That is, features such as form validations, navigation, database connections, cookies, HTML/CSS validations etc. To illustrate more on these,
Check out all the links:
You need to test the outgoing links from all the pages to the specific domain under test, all the internal links, links jumping on the same page, links used to send emails, whether broken links exist, and whether there are orphan pages.
Test forms on all pages:
At first, check all the validations in each field, Check for default values in the fields, Wrong inputs to the fields, options to create/modify/delete forms if any.
Cookie testing:
Cookies are small files stored in user’s web browser. Basically, they maintain the session – mainly login sessions. Test the application by enabling or disabling cookies in your browser options. Test if it’s encrypted before writing to user machine. If you’re testing session cookies, then check for login sessions and user stats after the session ends. Check the impact on application security by deleting cookies etc.
Validate your HTML/CSS:
HTML/CSS validations are important while optimizing site for search engines. Mainly validate the syntax errors. Check if the site is crawlable to search engines.
Database testing:
Data consistency is also very important in web application. Check for data integrity and errors while you edit, delete, modify or do any database related functionality.
2. Usability Testing
Usability testing involves evaluating the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of the application. It focuses on user-centric aspects such as navigation, readability, accessibility, ease of use, and responsiveness.
Test for navigation:
Navigation means how the user surfs the web pages, uses controls like buttons, boxes, or the links on the page to surf other pages.
Contents checking:
Contents in the page should be readable, meaningful, error free, properly styled. All the anchor texts should be working. Images should be placed at proper place in proper size.
Accessibility checking:
Your website should be usable for even people with disabilities.
3. Interface Testing
An Interface is the connection which integrates different components. Interface testing is the process of testing the communication between these different software systems. It includes two segments, such as Web server and Application server interface, Application server and Database server interface.
Check if all interactions between these servers executes and errors are handing properly. If the database or web server returns an error message for any query by the application server then the application server should catch and display these error messages appropriately to the users.
Check what happens if the user interrupts any transaction in-between. Check what happens if the connection to the web server resets in between
4. Compatibility Testing
The process of testing the web application on different devices, platforms, and browsers to ensure that it works as expected regardless of the environment. It ensures that the application functions consistently on all popular browsers and devices.
Device compatibility:
Now that, most people are using smart phones, it’s the era of mobile browsing. So, you need to test your web application on different smart phones with different platforms and browsers.
OS compatibility:
Some functionality in web application may not be compatible with all Operating Systems. All new technologies and APIs may not be available in all Operating Systems. Hence, you need to test your web application on different OS like Windows, MacOS, Linux etc.
Browser compatibility:
Your website coding should be cross-browser platform compatible. Test your web applications on different browsers like IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera etc. with different versions.
5. Performance Testing
Performance testing is crucial to ensure that the web application can handle a high volume of traffic. It should have fast loading times, and can handle concurrent user requests without crashing or slowing down, in any case. Performance testing includes load testing, stress testing, and other tests to evaluate the application’s performance under different conditions.
Load testing:
You need to test if many users can access a page at the same time. Simultaneously, the site should handle many user requests, large input data from users, connections to database, heavy load on specific pages etc.
Stress testing:
Generally stress means stretching the system beyond its specified limits. Stress testing is for testing whether the system breaks at high stress and recovers from crashes. Stress is generally given to input fields, sign-up/ sign-in areas, checkout pages etc.
6. Security Testing
Security testing is essential to ensure that the web application is secure and protected from various types of cyber-attacks, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and others. It includes testing for vulnerabilities, authentication, authorization, and encryption.
You need to test internal URLs are not opening directly without login. System’s reaction to invalid inputs need to be tested. Changing URL options directly should not permit the user to access other people’s stats. Web directories and files should not be accessible directly unless there is an option. Test if SSL is used for security measures and proper message is displaying while switching from HTTPS:// to HTTP:// and vice versa. All transactions, errors and security breach attempts should be written in log files somewhere on web server.
Conclusion
Overall, testing is a crucial part of the web application development process. Without a doubt, we can say, testing helps to ensure that the application is robust, reliable, secure, and provides a great user experience.
Lead QA Engineer at CeeGees Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd.