The previous part of this blog mostly focused on discussing the challenges of web application testing. Those were just the common daily challenges a web application QA engineer would face.
In this part, let's discuss how to overcome the challenges of web application testing with the help of a web application testing flow to deliver the best web application.
Before starting with the web testing checklists, let's dive into quality assurance matrices first. One of the important aspects of testing is tracking and measuring the quality assurance metrics of your web applications. This can help you identify potential issues and monitor the progress of testing.
You can track various metrics, including the number of issues found, fixed, reported, and unresolved. By tracking these metrics, you can create a much more effective testing process and improve the quality of your web applications.
Web Testing Checklists
I made a brief checklist of what to look out for during web application testing. You can perform a detailed test by following the given points as a guide.
Functionality Testing
Functionality testing ensures that a web application functions as it should. It is the most crucial part of web application testing. However, it might seem pretty basic initially. There are a lot of factors to consider while performing functional testing. I have listed them below:
1. Unit Testing
This part of functional testing covers and validates an individual area of an application. It is carried out in the initial development stage to ensure that no severe bugs will be encountered in the later phases.
2. Integration Testing
Integration testing involves running test code after the code has merged with the parent repository. This is done to test different components of the code as interdependent functions or modules. Since all the major cloud hosts, including Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket, provides built-in functionality for CI/CD integration, it has been easier for organizations and QA's to release products more frequently.
3. System Testing
System testing involves testing a software's functionality at the user interface level for features like login, logout and other supported processes, which confirm that different elements of the website work together. For web testing, this testing is widely put into automation.
4. Regression Testing
Regression testing re-checks the system after any bug fixes. It is not always true that a bug fix on one part of software does not affect other areas. So, it is to be done every time a vulnerable bug is fixed or at the final stage of bug fixing.
Performance Testing
Performance testing is simply increasing the traffic on every component of the software. People generally mistake the word 'performance' for 'speed'. Fast load and response times are indeed more important today but think on a bigger scale which requires more than clicking through all the links available on a website.
Performance testing is undoubtedly one of the most important parts of software testing. It is essential to check that the servers can handle the request loads during periods of high usage as the number of users increases. Stress testing, spike testing, load testing, and soak testing are examples of performance testing.
1. Load Testing
By the name itself, it's load testing. Increase the load on the system and observe its behaviour. For software with user login, try with thousands or millions of users (staying inside the server's capacity) logged in simultaneously. Focus on how the response and load time are affected by the load you have put into the system.
2. Stress Testing
Stress testing is also known as fatigue tests. In this part of performance testing, the system is put into the load outside its boundary. First, put the system into expected maximum load capacity, increase the load beyond its maximum expected load capacity, and measure the application performance. It also determines how many concurrent loads the app can handle before crashing.
3. Spike Testing
Spike it up! We should increase the load gradually before reaching the maximum expected load in load and stress testing. Spike testing exponentially adds the load to the system and removes the logarithmic ally. For example, if you add a thousand threads at a time for load testing, you add a hundred thousand threads to observe the system in spike testing.
4. Soak Testing
Also known as endurance testing, soak testing measures the application's performance over an extended period. A system load can be longer, not only when testing for a short period, so this testing helps you identify your system endurance. You can also find memory leaks and other mistakes that might occasionally happen by running endurance tests.
Usability Testing
Usability testing is simply the practice of identifying the ways to enhance your product by watching how the consumers interact with the product or a prototype of it. It's a UX research technique focused on your product's usability.
Additionally, usability measures how simple users use your product to complete a specific activity. Focus on UI/UX. You are almost all done with usability testing because UX is a broader concept than usability.
If the users do not accept your product, it is useless. User habits and preferences will be revealed through usability testing as they relate to your product. This will also show you how to design as per the user's demands or simply remind you of the details you may have missed. Usability testing can be performed at any stage of the design process after the initial ideas have been transformed into design solutions, but the earlier, the better.
Finally,
The aforementioned main points are among the basics to start with web application testing. There are many more to dive into, like testing local deployments of the websites, automated testing, automated visual testing and so on.
Every task should be done within QA metrics and follow the software testing life cycle. Testing is never enough. It is just about the guts of QA engineers to release a product with the very minimum issues, either discovered or not. After the basics, it is up to you to decide on further testing or to move towards release. Remember those challenges discussed in Part I of this blog as well.
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