26 Feb 2018

5 best practices for web application testing

• Automation Testing
  
• Web applications
  

Web applications are more than just simple information-based websites. The increase in size and complexities together with shorter development cycles in Agile and recurrent changes in requirements present numerous QA and testing challenges. With all the impending issues, web application testing holds more importance than ever. However, testing a web application is not just an ordinary task, and depends on several factors such as compatibility across various browsers, application performance, user experience, ensuring proper security, etc. The enterprises must deploy skilled testers to assess all aspects of the website across platforms, browsers, and devices. The testers must always implement web application testing best practices in order to produce accurate and reliable test results without increasing testing times. Here are the 5 best practices for web application testing.

1. Emphasis on Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing

With more and more users accessing websites on their mobile phones and tablets, enterprises are exploring more ways to make their websites mobile-friendly. Responsive web design makes the web applications deliver a rich user experience on every device. To ensure that the web application is able to work well on all browsers and devices, developers build responsive websites by using open web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Hence, it becomes important to perform cross-browser compatibility testing to ensure that the website is accessible on every available version of individual web browsers.

2. Evaluate the Application’s Performance Under Various Conditions

In addition to assessing the proper working of the application on all devices and browsers, it is also equally important to ensure that it does not crash under heavy loads. Sometimes minor flaws in the coding or design can affect the website’s performance adversely. Therefore, it is important to perform load testing and evaluate how the application performs under varying loads. There are various automation tools available to accelerate load testing.

3. Choose the Right Parameters for Usability Testing

Usability and the user-experience of the web applications are of the utmost importance to keep the visitors engaged and convert them into customers. Hence, it is important to evaluate the usability of the applications based on most appropriate parameters. Performing usability testing on the application before its release is a best practice. Usability testing involves several parameters such as UI design, speed, navigability, content readability, and accessibility.

4. Validate all Security Issues with Security Testing

Underestimating the significance of web application security is a ticking time bomb. Even a single vulnerability can lead to a massive data breach that can shake even the largest of companies down to its grounds, causing a negative impact, substantial financial consequences, and the loss of public trust. It is therefore imperative to ensure that the web application is thoroughly tested on the security front. A number of strategies that should be incorporated into the web app security testing are as follows:
• Defining coding standards and quality controls
• Creating strategies based on both internal and external challenges
• Using industry standards as a benchmark
• Implementing a cross-functional approach to policy building

5. Integrate Exploratory Testing in the Software Development Lifecycle

Exploratory testing reduces testing time and discovers more defects. As a regular practice in the software testing approach, testers write and execute test cases simultaneously. When failing to understand the shortcomings of exploratory testing, they are surrounded by more defects. By integrating exploratory testing with other black-hat and white-hat software testing techniques, the limitations of web app testing can be easily overcome. The integration can help in producing more reliable test results while reducing the testing time significantly.

Conclusion

Every application whether web, mobile, or desktop-based, is experiencing more users. Considering the device variety, the ease of access has grown fundamentally over the past few years. With so much going on in the software domain, there is no way that testing will get easier. TestingXperts follows a comprehensive QA strategy that handles the unique requirements and challenges associated with testing web applications. Connect with our experts to improve the overall user experience of your application with our testing strategies.