Testing web applications in practice

Software testing process is gaining importance at same time that size and complexity of software are growing. The specifics characteristics of web applications, like client-server architecture, heterogeneous languages and technologies or massive concurrent access, makes hard adapting classic software testing practices and strategies to web applications. This work exposes an overview of testing processes and techniques applied to web development. This work also describes a practical example testing a simple web application using only open-source tools

A Review on Web Application Testing and its Current Research Directions

Testing is an important part of every software development process on which companies devote considerable time and effort. The burgeoning web applications and their proliferating economic significance in the society made the area of web application testing an area of acute importance. The web applications generally tend to take faster and quicker release cycles making their testing very challenging. The main issues in testing are cost efficiency and bug detection efficiency. Coverage-based   testing is the process of ensuring exercise of specific program elements. Coverage measurement helps determine the “thoroughness” of testing achieved. An avalanche of tools, techniques, frameworks came into existence to ascertain the quality of web applications.  A comparative study of some of the prominent tools, techniques and models for web application testing is presented. This work highlights the current research directions of some of the web application testing techniques

Web Application Bypass Testing

Abstract — Input validation refers to checking user inputs to a program to ensure that they conform to expectations of the program. Input validation is used to check the format of numbers and strings, check the length of strings, and to ensure that strings do not contain invalid characters. Input validation testing (IVT) is particularly important for software that has a heavy reliance on user inputs, including Web applications. A common technique in Web applications is to perform input validation on the client by using HTML attributes and scripting languages such as JavaScript. An insidious problem with performing input validation on the client is that end users have the ability to bypass this validation. Bypass testing is a unique and novel way to create test cases that is available only because of the unusual mix of client-server, HTML GUI, and JavaScript technologies that are used in Web applications. This workshop paper presents the issues and concerns that allow bypass testing, the preliminary concepts behind the technique, and some early results on applying it. How effective and useful bypass testing can be in testing Web applications will be determined through ongoing research and automation