Thursday, June 21, 2012

Enter Automated Software Testing For Your Web page

You just completed constructing your company's web site. You have tested it yourself and had other company personnel test it. The web site now goes live. A few weeks later you start off finding emails from irate prospects who complain that they are unable to spot their orders for the reason that particular actions in the Get Now process give errors. You rapidly fix the challenge. A few days later you get complaints about some other situation and you once more react rapidly to fix the web site. This continues for a few months till the complaints finally halt and factors stabilize. At this point you make some enhancements to your web site. A few days later a customer email alerts you to the reality that in the process of making this enhancement you broke something else on the web site. Again you devote time to discover and fix the challenge but by now you are perplexed and not a small frustrated. These difficulties have cost you quite a few prospects in the final few months an d potentially spread ill will across the broader customer community. It appears to you that the only way to have detected these difficulties just before they went live was to have employed a massive army of software testers, something your company is unable to afford. Enter automated software testing. Whilst absolutely nothing can replace effective human testers, broad test coverage requires some degree of software automation for it to be economically feasible. Automated testing tools can give a massive workforce multiplier and do a exceptionally effective job complimenting human testers. Just about every modify to your web site no matter how tiny requires thorough testing to make sure that absolutely nothing else was affected. This becomes exceptionally time consuming exceptionally rapidly due to the massive quantity of possible situations to test. A technique whereby tests are automated working with software becomes an financial necessity. There are two classes of automated testing tools. The 1st type, functional and regression testing tools, assists to make confident that the web site behaves as it should certainly: for example if a customer clicks on button X, page Y is displayed without errors. Functional and regression testing tools are able to automate a massive quantity of scenarios to make sure that your web site works as intended. The second type, load testing tools gauge how nicely your web site performs when subjected to a massive tension, such as a massive quantity of simultaneous customers. I will be discussing load testing in a separate post. I will now give you an overview of the simple characteristics of functional testing. Prior to you can start any type of functional test automation you will need to identify the test scenarios you wish to automate. As soon as this is done, you will need to generate test scripts that cover these scenarios. A functional testing tool will usually record user interactions with a web site. As you perform a variety of operations on your web site or application, the tool records every single step. When you finish recording, it generates an automated script from your interactions with your web site. Alternatively you could use the tool to construct the script by hand. Ordinarily testers tend to do a combination of the two. They will use the recorder to generate the simple framework of their scripts and then tweak the scripts by hand to incorporate unique situations. Scripts can be graphical and/or text based in nature. A effective functional testing tool does not require customers to have a programming background. Customers not proficient in programming will perform predominantly with graphical scripts. In most tools graphical scripts will usually show all interactions in a tree structure and customers can edit any node of the tree to modify the script. Some customers nevertheless, who have programming backgrounds might possibly wish to program their scripts. These customers will usually perform with a text script written in a common language such as JavaScript or VBScript. As soon as you have generated your script you will need to insert checks in your scripts to test if your web site is functioning correctly. Such checks are frequently referred to as checkpoints. A checkpoint verifies that values of a property obtained when testing the web site match expected values. Checkpoints enable you to set the criteria for comparing expected values with obtained values. The expected value of a property is derived from recording interactions with the web internet site. It is viewed and modified from checkpoints. The present value is retrieved through replay (i.e. through the execution of the test case). There are quite a few several sorts of checkpoints. A page checkpoint verifies the supply of a page or frame as nicely as its statistical properties. You can check for broken links, verify link URLs, image sources, the hierarchy of HTML tags or even the entire HTML supply of the Web page or frame. You can also set thresholds for the loading time of a page. A text checkpoint verifies that a given text is displayed or is not displayed in a specified area on a web page. A web object checkpoint verifies the properties of a web object e.g. the value of an HTML INPUT field. A database checkpoint verifies the contents of a database utilised by your web site. When you replay a test script, the testing tool will open the recorded application and perform the recorded actions in the similar sequence they had been specified in the script. As it replays the script it will also run via all the checkpoints you have inserted into the script. In addition, you can test your applications behavior with varying information inputs. For example you can try to submit a page following getting into several values in the edit box of a web page. At the end of the replay a detailed report is usually be generated. Functional test automation allows you to automate the repetitive testing of a massive quantity of scenarios across your web site. Functional testing tools are an significant weapon in your development arsenal whose use offers a massive productivity achieve and allows for tiny testing groups to achieve significantly significantly more perform. There is a exceptionally powerful financial case for the use of Functional Testing Tools as component of the development and deployment cycle of a web site.





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