A Web Application Testing Plan in 10 Easy Steps

A good web application testing plan ensures that a web application is functional and user-friendly. By empowering the testing phase to evaluate critical areas of user experience, companies can develop applications that are instantly user friendly – an important aspect of sales momentum during an application’s release period. If you need a plan for testing your web app, you will find that there are plenty to choose from. But the best plans contain the following 10 steps:

Developing Objectives

Assuming that testers already have their objectives in place, some plans skip this step. But there are two things that testers should be reminded of when developing objectives: make them measurable and prioritize them. Without measurable, prioritized statistics, the steps below are without a solid foundation.

Establishing Reporting Rules

Process and reporting rules establish how issues should be reported and categorized, and who will assign them to team members. For small teams, these rules may be communicated verbally. For large teams, implementing them as a policy is best.

Setting Up the Test Environment

The test environment should be established separate from a company’s development and production environment. This means that a web server and database server should be reserved for test purposes alone. Once these components are in place, establish a procedure for accepting code into the test environment, and then sending it out.

Tracking Test Results

Tracking test results has four objectives: storing results, organizing them, distributing them to team members in the appropriate manner, and keeping management informed of test progress. For most companies, tracking test results requires issue tracking software.

Load Testing

Load testing examines the loading time of an application’s pages. Because applications that take longer than 15 seconds to load are unpopular with end users, altering an application’s design to improve load time could be a necessity.

Usability Testing

Usability testing evaluates ease of navigation, ability to access control options, and design consistency. If an application lacks usability, its effectiveness is lost on the end user.

Unit Testing

In this step, particular aspects of an application are tested for functionality. Two important examples of unit testing are: examining whether a “submit” command communicates the intended information, and examining whether data fields accept the correct combination of characters.

HTML Verification

HTML verification has two crucial aspects: verifying syntax, and verifying that the application looks as expected in different web browsers, different screen resolutions, and different operating systems. In the absence of these verifications, an application can look far different on an end user’s screen that it does on a test screen.

User Acceptance Testing

User acceptance testing assesses whether an application achieves its intended use. In most cases, the best way to predict an application’s acceptance is through beta tests.

Security Testing

The final step of a web application testing plan should focus on security. A security test should focus on internal and external threats, and should occur periodically at set schedule. Ideally, a test plan should be developed with the assistance of a web security specialist.

Conclusion

There are several plans for testing web applications, but many of them skip over steps that beginning testers may not be familiar with. The 10-step process above is a step-by-step analysis of how an application should be tested, from start to finish. To learn more about each step, contact a provider of issue and defect tracking services.