Web Testing- Selenium and LoadRunner Testing

The deployment of web technology on different softwares these days has called for highly advanced testing technologies into play. Be it cloud application, web application or mobile application testing technology, testing plays a vital role in order to analyze bugs and fixes and combat them. While it is important to test an application before its launch, it’s also important to see that it doesn’t consume much time.

Let us talk about web application testing. Out of various testing applications like WebLOAD, Selenium, LoadRunner, etc., two applications have stolen the show because of their multitasking behavior, and are fetching more attention every passing day. Before we talk about those applications let us discuss what is web testing to have a substantial idea of its role in web development.

What is Web Application Testing?

It is an activity, a tester has to perform every day, in order to combat bugs or analyze the behavior of the application to predict the chances of any further repercussions in the future. In order to begin the testing process, a tester has to go through the following checklist:

Functionality Testing

It is also called website functional testing, and it is the process of checking all the site navigation external links, images, streaming content, form submission, exception handling, Ajax functionality, state maintenance, e-commerce transaction, search functionality, transaction handling and printing web pages. The tester has to take proper care so that the internal links, links jumping on the same page and outgoing links are intact. There should be no orphan pages and broken links.

Usability Testing

This is a user level testing, done to test how internet or browser friendly the website is. Major things that a tester has to look for are the responsiveness of the website, caching behavior, ease of usage, configurability and localization. He/she must verify that the main menu is present in every page or not and how user friendly it is in terms of consistency, instructions and content.

Interface Testing

The two most popular interfaces are, web server and application server interface and application server and database server interface. The tester must ensure that the servers are properly executed, and errors and bugs are fixed. If there occurs an error in database or web server, for any query initiated by application server, then the application server must pick the error and display it appropriately to the user.

Compatibility Testing

Website compatibility is evaluated in four different tests:

Operating System Compatibility- Some functionality of the web applications may not be compatible with the operating system. All new web development technologies are not likely to be available in all the operating systems. So, the tester must perform the test in OSes like Windows, Linux, Unix, Solaris and so on.

Browser Compatibility- All the browsers have their own configuration and settings that the web page must be compatible with. The website must be cross browser compatible.

Mobile Browsing- As mobiles are a ruling technology in modern era, it is very important for the web pages to perform well on all mobile browsers.

Performance Testing

This test is done in two phases, web load testing and web stress testing. Web load test is performed by the tester to ensure that the website is able to handle heavy load on specific pages, simultaneous user requests and connections to database, large user inputs and so on. Whereas, the web stress testing is performed by breaking the site using stress. It is done to see how the system reacts to stress and recovers from crashes.

Security Testing

This testing is done by pasting internal URL onto the address bar of the browser without login. The tester must ensure that

Web directories and files are not directly accessible without a download option.

The Captcha for automated script logins must be checked

All the error messages, transactions, security breach attempts must get stored in log files somewhere in the web server.

What are the Web Testing Tools used nowadays?

These days Selenium and LoadRunner are gaining popularity in the world of web application testing.

Selenium: Selenium is a bundle of software tools each with a different utility and approach to supporting test automation. They are:

Selenium 2 or Selenium WebDriver- This is the latest addition to the Selenium toolkit. It provides awesome features that include cohesive and object oriented API. The limitations in the old implementation are sorted out as well.

Selenium 1 or Selenium RC or Selenium Remote Control: It was the most powerful tool before Selenium and Webdriver merged. Now it is not actively supported anymore, especially in maintenance mode.

Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment): It is a prototyping tool basically used for building scripts. It is a Firefox plugin that provides a very friendly interface to develop automated tests.

Selenium Grid: It allows the Selenium RC solution for scaling large test suites and testing suites that must be run in multiple environments. Selenium Grid allows the tester to run tests in parallel, in other words, different tests can be run simultaneously on different remote machines.

LoadRunner: Here is one of the best software testing tool in the industry, released from Hewlett Packard. Testing applications, measurement of system behaviour and performance under load was never so easy before. It was acquired by HPE as part of Mercury Interactive in the year, 2006. Like Selenium, LoadRunner also comes as a bundle with different components such as, Load Generator, VuGen, Controller, Agent Process and Analysis.