Increasing number of enterprises are now migrating traditional desktop applications to web-based interfaces. The proliferation of mobile devices has led to this change in strategy, owing to which the functionality of web applications has become extremely important.
Irrespective of whether you are building an internal tool or a web application for the end customer, it is essential to focus on the functional aspects of the application. Here we are not referring to a hybrid or native mobile application but a web application (or web app) that should work across different browsers, platforms, and mobile devices.
Partnering with a company that provides web application testing services helps you accelerate the process of web application testing. Whether you partner or have an in-house team of QA engineers, it is still important to have know-how about the essentials of web application testing.
What is Web Application (or app) Testing?
As the name indicates, web app testing is a testing methodology through which the functionalities and features of a website are tested for the mobile devices. There is an option to perform web application testing (i.e. from the functionalities standpoint) either on mobile emulators (or simulators) or on real mobile devices.
Though most functionalities and features of the website can be tested on emulators (or simulators), web app testing on real devices helps in testing from the performance and power (consumption) point of view.
QA teams majorly rely on automated cloud-based solutions to perform web app testing as it reaps results at an expedited pace. The other advantage of testing on a cloud-based infrastructure is that testing can be performed at scale – something that is unimaginable on a local (or in-house) infrastructure.
Also Read – The Perfect Checklist for Effective Website Testing
Types Of Web App Testing
Now that we have covered the basics of web app testing, let’s deep dive into different types of tests that can be automated using web app testing:
1. Functional Testing
This form of testing is performed for verifying the functionalities of the web application. The testing is conducted from an end-user’s perspective, thereby ensuring that the implemented features and functionalities are in-line with the functional specifications.
Automated functional testing should be complemented with manual testing so that the product features are tested from all the aspects. It is important to conduct exploratory testing in order to provide a complete positive experience to the end-users.
Also Read – Top 10 Tips For Multi-lingual Website Testing
2. Cross-browser testing
A web application is basically a website that opens up in a web browser on your mobile device. consumers have the option to view your web app on their choice of browser, browser version, and operation system. This is why the experience must be tailor-made for different device viewports.
This is where cross-browser testing comes into the picture. It is a testing approach where the web app is tested against different combinations of browsers and operating systems.
Automated cross-browser testing lets you perform testing at scale which eventually helps you improve the browser coverage. There are a number of automated cross-browser testing tools that support integration with popular CI/CD tools (e.g. Jenkins, Circle CI, etc.).
This helps in running cross-browser tests at a faster pace, thereby providing a uniform user-experience across different browsers & operating systems.
3. Performance Testing
Your web application might perform exceptionally well when it is used by a limited user-base. Kudos to you! What if the performance becomes sluggish when it is used by a larger user-base? This experience will drive the users away from the web application.
This is where performance testing becomes extremely important. Performance testing is a testing methodology (or approach) where the web application is tested with varied level of user loads. It is loosely termed as load testing or stress testing. Apache JMeter is one of the widely used automated performance testing tools.
Automated stress testing helps you run performance tests at varied peak loads, that too at an accelerated pace.
4. Regression Testing
Consider a scenario where few lines of code that works at the unit level causes havoc when it is integrated with other modules in the system? If this code goes into the final version of the product, it could lead to side-effects on many features that were already working in the system.
Hence, it is recommended to perform regression tests (or repeated functional testing) even if there are minimal changes in the existing code base. Regression testing is software testing practice through which modified code (or new code) is tested rigorously for ensuring that old product features are working as intended in the product.
Rather than following a manual approach to regression testing, it is essential to follow an automated approach where automated systems re-run regression tests at specified intervals of time (e.g. weekly, monthly, daily, etc.).
Automated regression testing helps in ensuring that any line of code that goes into the repository does not cause any side effect on the existing features that are already a part of the release.
Also Read – 6 Crucial Steps to Web Application Testing
Best Practices Of Web App Testing
Irrespective of the type of web app testing being performed, it is essential to incorporate the best practices for reaping maximum benefits of that testing methodology. A web application testing company like KiwiQA with expertise on a range of software projects can help implement these best practices for your project.
Before kick starting web app testing, you should draft a detailed automated web app testing strategy to keep a track of the overall progress. Here are some of the best practices as far as web app testing is concerned:
- At what intervals should you trigger regression tests for unraveling side-effects of the source code?
- What automated tool should be used for running regression tests at scale?
- What CI/CD tools should be used for performing smart regression testing?
- How much maintenance does the shortlisted regression automation tool require?
- What project management tools should be used for ensuring that bugs raised during the regression testing process are assigned to the respective developer (in the shortest possible time)?
Along with these best practices, it becomes necessary to perform exploratory regression testing for making sure that all the corner test cases are also run for the code that is recently pushed in the repository.
Also Read – Difference between Web App Testing and Mobile App Testing
Conclusion
Regression testing is an important testing methodology that helps in ensuring that a new piece of code is not causing any side effects on the features that are already a part of the release. Rather than running regression tests in a manual way, it is recommended to choose automated regression testing so that tests can be run at a large scale.
In order to run regression tests with each release, the test suite should be integrated with popular CI/CD tools (e.g. Jenkins, Circle CI, etc.) so that even a single line of code change triggers the regression test suite.
In case your team does not have expertise with large scale regression testing, it is recommended to partner with a global web application testing services company like KiwiQA so that you give wings to your regression testing strategy.