Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
specifications. Second, robustness of the product as a whole must be tested. In
addition, the product must be tested to stress testing and volume testing. Third, the
SQA Group must check that the product satisfies all its constraints (Schach
1999
).
10.8.1 Systems Testing
System testing is the process of testing the integrated software in the context of the
total system that it supports. System testing ensures that the complete system
complies with the functional and nonfunctional requirements. Tests conducted at
this level include the following:
• Functional Testing: Functional testing, also called requirement testing, finds
difference between the functional requirements and the system.
• Performance testing: Performance testing finds difference between the design
goals selected during system design and the system (Bruegge and Dutoit
2004
).
• Recovery Testing: A system test forces the software to fail in various ways and
verifies that complete recovery is properly performed.
• Security Testing: Test cases are conducted to verify that proper controls have
been designed and installed in the system to protect it from a number of risks.
• Stress Testing: This type of testing, similar in concept to security testing, exe-
cutes a system in a manner that demands resources in abnormal quantity, fre-
quency or volume (Burch
1992
).
10.8.2 Web Application Testing
The distributed and decentralized nature of web technologies imposes some unique
testing issues for developers. Web applications are executed in one of the most
brutal environments an application can be placed, the internet. Web applications
are susceptible to a continuous barrage of attacks, irregular usage patterns, high
load and a desired high availability. This gives us the outline of what we must test
for in order to provide the most efficient and thorough testing of our web platform.
• Security: web applications must be secure. This includes correct security cer-
tificates, file permissions and hardware configurations of wide area network
interface components when doing in house hosting.
• Functionality: all links, animations, images and downloads should be available
and responsive. There are many suites and toolsets to accomplish this, but it is
hard to beat the manual site walk through.
• Compatibility is a large portion of what makes web interfaces complex to
design. The W3C provides standards and guidelines for web design. However,
not all web browser developers are capable of following the rendering recom-
mendations to the letter so you will need to verify your page at least does not
appear deformed or dysfunctional on a wide variety of web engines.
