10 steps to test a web application

Recently I found a very useful article while goggling related to testing web application. for more detail you can visit http://www.adminitrack.com/ I found this very much useful.

The following 10 steps important in making sure a web application is ready to be deployed. Depending on size, complexity, and corporate policies, modify the following steps to meet your specific testing needs.

Step 1 - Objectives :
Make sure to establish your testing objectives up front and make sure they are measurable. It will make your life a lot easier by having written objectives that your whole team can understand and rally around. In addition to documenting your objectives, make sure your objectives are prioritized.
Ask yourself questions like "What is most important: minimal defects or time-to-market?"Here are two examples of how to determine priorities:

If you are building a medical web application that will assist in diagnosing illnesses, and someone could potentially die based on how correctly the application functions, you may want to make testing the correctness of the business functionality a higher priority than testing for navigational consistency throughout the application.

If you are testing an application that will be used to solicit external funding, you may want to put testing the aspects of the application that impact the visual appeal as the highest testing priority.
Your web application doesn't have to be perfect; it just needs to meet your intended customer's requirements and expectations.

Step 2 – Process and Reporting:
Make sure that everyone on your testing team knows his or her role. Who should report what to whom and when? In other words, define your testing process.
Use the following questions to help you get started:
How will issues be reported?
Who can assign issues?
How will issues be categorized?
Who needs what report and when do they need it?
Are team meetings scheduled in advance or scheduled as needed?
You may define your testing process and reporting requirements formally or informally, depending on your particular needs. The main point to keep in mind is to organize your team in a way that supports your testing objectives and takes into account the individual personalities on your team. One size never fits all when dealing with people.

Step 3 - Tracking Results :
Once you start executing your test plans, you will probably generate a large number of bugs, issues, defects, etc. You will want a way to easily store, organize, and distribute this information to the appropriate technical team members. You will also need a way to keep management informed on the status of your testing efforts. If your company already has a system in place to track this type of information, don't try to reinvent the wheel. Take advantage of what's already in place.
(I used Mantis as well as Bugzilla)

Step 4 - Test Environment :
Set up a test environment that is separate from your development and production environment. This includes a separate web server, database server, and application server if applicable.
Generally known staging server or testing server. For every project there should be a staging server on which we can perform testing freely.


Step 5 - Usability Testing :
In usability testing, you'll be looking at aspects of your web application that affect the user's experience, such as: How easy is it to navigate through your web application?
Is it obvious to the user which actions are available to him or her?
Is the look-and-feel of your web application consistent from page to page, including font sizes and colors?

For instance, if a user forgets to fill in a required field, you might think it is a good idea to present the user with a friendly error message and change the color of the field label to red or some other conspicuous color. However, changing the color of the field label would not really help a user who has difficulty deciphering colors. The use of color may help most users, but you would want to use an additional visual clue, such as placing an asterisk beside the field in question or additionally making the text bold.

Step 6 – Unit Testing :
Make sure here I am not pointing about Unit Testing(by developer generally know white box).
Unit testing is focused on verifying small portions of functionality. For example, an individual unit test case might focus on verifying that the correct data has been saved to the database when the Submit button on a particular page is clicked.

An important subset of unit testing that is often overlooked is range checking. That is, making sure all the fields that collect information from the user, can gracefully handle any value that is entered. Most people think of range checking as making sure that a numeric field only accepts numbers. In addition to traditional range checking make sure you also check for less common, but just as problematic exceptions. For example, what happens when a user enters his or her last name and the last name contains an apostrophe, such as O'Brien? Different combinations of databases and database drivers handle the apostrophe differently, sometimes with unexpected results. Proper unit testing will help rid your web application of obvious errors that your users should never have to encounter.

Step 7 - Verifying the HTML:
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the computer language sent from your web server to the web browser on your users' computer to display the pages that make up your web application. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) manages the HTML specification. One major objective of HTML is to provide the ability for anyone from anywhere to access information on the World Wide Web. This concept generally holds true if you conform strictly to the relevant version of the HTML specification that you will support. Unfortunately, in the real world, it is possible for a developer to inadvertently use a proprietary HTML tag that may not work for all of your intended users.

Verifying HTML is simple in concept but can be very time consuming in practice. A good place to start is with the World Wide Web Consortium's free HTML Validation Service (http://validator.w3.org). There are also other online and downloadable applications to help in this area such as Net Mechanic (http://www.netmechanic.com).
There are two main aspects of verifying the validity of your HTML.
First, you want to make sure that your syntax is correct, such as verifying that all opening and closing tags match, etc.
Secondly, you want to verify how your pages look in different browsers, at different screen resolutions, and on different operating systems(Cross browser compatibility). Create a profile of your target audience and make some decisions on what browsers you will support, on which operating systems, and at what screen resolutions.

Step 8 - Load Testing :
For this its need a tool. I think manually it not possible. Ya you can write automate script with help of Dev team.

Step 9 - User Acceptance Testing :
By performing user acceptance testing, you are making sure your web application fits the use for which it was intended. Simply stated, you are making sure your web application makes things easier for the user and not harder. One effective way to handle user acceptance testing is by setting up a beta test for your web application.

Step 10 - Testing Security :
With the large number of highly skilled hackers in the world, security should be a huge concern for anyone building a web application. You need to test how secure your web application is from both external and internal threats. The security of your web application should be planned for and verified by qualified security specialists.
After performing your initial security testing, make sure to also perform ongoing security audits to ensure your web application remains secure over time as people and technology change.

Testing a web application can be a totally overwhelming task. The best advice I can give you is to keep prioritizing and focusing on the most important aspects of your application and don't forget to solicit help from your fellow team members.

By following the steps above coupled with your own expertise and knowledge, you will have a web application you can be proud of and that your users will love. You will also be giving your company the opportunity to deploy a web application that could become a run away success and possibly makes tons of money, saves millions of lives, or slashes customer support costs in half.

Reference: : http://www.adminitrack.com/