The Importance of Application Testing
When rolling out a new web site or application on the internet, your brand and your bottom line depend upon its success. Making a good first impression on visitors and providing stellar performance without any code or other errors should be your ultimate goal. The best way to ensure that your web site or web application will perform as expected, is to plan and execute proper usability, server load, and security testing before you release your project to the world. This article explains the type of testing you should perform and the advantages.
Critical Testing That Should Be Considered
Web applications need to be tested in a variety of ways to establish how they will respond under specific sets of circumstances. This is referred to as performance testing. Two more critical examples are stress and load testing. Load testing simulates estimated workloads to determine how long it will take for all the page elements to load for each user. This is from a usability viewpoint and not a technical one. This directly affects your end user. Stress testing is used to determine the maximum load (or number of visitors) that your web server can support at one time. This is vital for applications since most user issues will only occur when the server is stressed.
Security Testing Is Another Critical Area That Should not be Ignored
Unfortunately there will always be highly skilled malicious people in the world. Both external and internal security issues should be addressed before releasing an application for public consumption. Also bear in mind that ongoing security audits should be performed regularly to protect your investment as both consumers and available technology changes over time. Some other testing you should contemplate includes HTML verification, unit function testing, and user acceptance testing.
What Happens If I Release My Project Without Testing?
We live in a fast-paced world and web site or application response time should not exceed 10 seconds. (And some people think that’s too long!) You have a very short amount of time to capture someone’s attention, engage them, and then engross them in your content. When pages take too long to load or features don’t work properly, they are likely to move along to the next new thing. Once a user has a bad experience at your site it is nearly impossible to get them back.
How Does Application Testing Benefit Me?
Testing any project prior to release benefits you by preventing unnecessary poor end-user experiences. Or even worse, application crashes. Proper testing scrutinizes your site or system for errors, inconsistencies, and vulnerabilities. Since most bugs are only discovered when an application or a server is under stress, testing shows you what you can’t see during development.
Getting Started
The ideal way to initiate a solid testing program is to first clearly define your objectives, set up team collaboration to manage processes and reporting issues, decide how you will track results, and finally create a testing environment that emulates your actual project.
