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The software development life cycle (SDLC) is composed of various stages. Software testing is one of the significant phases within the software development cycle (SDCL). 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. The software itself also comes in different varieties, which all require testing before they’re released on the market.

One variety is software for web applications. The importance of this type of software has increased rapidly since the arrival of the Internet. The majority of the security threats start off from Internet and it is necessary to make sure that the web software is carefully tested prior to releasing to the costumer.

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 standanrd pattern for the realease of web software consists of two main stages, alpha and 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. Software that passed the alpha test will not be released till all the major functionalities of the software are built and tested.

After the alpha testing stage is finished, the software advances to the beta phase of testing. The web software should be fully completed by now. The software is released to a restricted number of users for testing before it is officially released. The alpha/beta testing method is not the standard procedure when testing web site design. This imply that it is possible to build and test one page at a time and later go to the next one with independent testing for each one.

In code testing the software testing or development engineer examines the codes for software bugs. It’s essential for the software to be free of bugs because the web development process is very quick. 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. 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 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 performed against heavy loads or inputs such as multiple user log-ins and mail servers to determine the point at which the web-site/application fails or the point when performance degrades. 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 very important whenever there’s iterative development of software. 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.