Software Testing Evolution and Revolution

So far as the Information Technology industry is concerned, exponential growth has become a regular phenomenon. Although the history of IT is comparatively shorter than that of other industries, revolutions are predominant in it, taking into considerations the super computers, microchips, personal computers, power PC chips, Artificial Intelligence, the World Wide Web and lots more. Each of these had some or the other transformative impact on businesses and people. The last decade has witnessed the evolution of software testing solutions into a key constituent for businesses to accomplish success and a prospect for the most talented to build rewarding careers.

The Bygone Model: Only a few years ago, the software tester was a small player within the software development procedure. The fundamental role of software testing comprised capturing of bugs in codes, a procedure mostly carried out manually. The entire process was non-intellectual, repetitive and a routine one, concentrating more on templates and metrics.

In a life cycle including multiple steps, testing had a time slot immediately prior to release of the software product. Regarded as less important than the planning and development stages, the testing stage often had to be squeezed in towards the project’s end. Due to this, testers often became answerable in case there were any quality issues cropping up after the product launch.

The New Model: The rapid proliferation of the internet has literally transformed the way business is done. It has made room for fascinating avenues and prospects related to business development and profit. In the era of the internet, web-oriented applications have turned into means through which both internal and external customers of an organization interact with each other and the business.

As enterprise software applications became more and more consumer-oriented, the competitive advantage and competency of business gradually came to the forefront. This had a dramatic effect on businesses, especially for industries like healthcare, finance, media, education and retail.

However, the pitfall in this rapid revolution is that companies which are slow to adopt the changes and deal with the complexities that crop up as a result of this software revolution may face grim consequences.

The Function of Software Testing within the New Model: The current business scenario involves more focus on consumer-oriented applications and since there is direct interaction between the business and consumers, such applications are required to perform faultlessly. To ensure optimum performance, software testing is given immense importance in the software development process and has become an integral component of system development lifecycle.

Presently, software testing has turned into a comprehensive domain that incorporates the complete software system from identifying defects to coming up with a supportive feedback device for the developer. In fact, evolving from the conventional stage of debugging codes, software testing now involves testing the analysis, testing the design as well as testing the development.

Challenges of the new Model: As the software development procedure gradually assumed increasing importance, certain challenges cropped up. Since software testing has now become a comprehensive risk management and quality assurance activity, it requires a broader knowledge base and skill set on the part of the software testing engineers. They should have the ability to chart out, devise and execute efficient test processes to address concerns related to inconsistency and quality of data, end-user expectations regarding business flow and performance of the applications. Another obvious challenge in the domain of software testing is the complicated nature of software and technology, thanks to the consumer triggered application evolution.

Addressing the Challenges in Software Testing: The issue is that in comparison to the growing demand, the number of qualified engineers falls short. As the need for software testing is expected to see a considerable rise, there is indeed a large gap between the demand and supply for software testing engineers. To resolve this problem, organizations have three options. First, they can continue with the old testing model. Secondly, the existing testing staff can be trained to get adapted to the new testing model. Herein, it is imperative to make your testers involved in all the processes from design to implementation, so that they can contribute their knowledge, recommendations and proficiency across the entire lifecycle of application development.

There is a third solution for companies which cannot afford to lose time catching up with the new model of software testing because of their heavy reliance on web-based applications. There are independent service providers rendering expert software testing services through the incorporation of new trends such as agile development, testing in the cloud and so on. These organizations have turned into vital arms for a number of businesses intending to enhance their product quality effectively, economically and on time.

With the rapid evolution of software technology and many revolutions taking place in this field, software testing indeed becomes a promising and rewarding career for IT professionals. In fact, the software test engineer‘s role is rapidly becoming as prestigious as that of the software developer. And the number of software testing companies is also increasing. The challenge now is to find companies which can provide the right testing services.

We provide software testing services India. If you would like to know more about our certified software testers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

A Glance into 15 Things driving .NET web developers crazy

ASP.NET offers a cost-free web framework enabling development of web applications and websites using JavaScript, CSS and HTML. ASP.NET renders support to three approaches for building of web sites:

• As a web development platform, ASP.Net presents a complete software infrastructure, a programming model, and a range of services essential to build up tough web application for mobile devices as well as PCs.


• ASP.Net works over the HTTP protocol, making use of the HTTP policies and commands to establish a two-way cooperation and communication on a browser-to-server basis.


• ASP.Net is in fact a segment of Microsoft .Net platform. The applications of .Net comprise compiled codes, composed with the reusable or extensible objects or components available within the .Net framework. The complete hierarchy of classes within the .Net framework can be used by the codes.

The application codes of this web framework can be composed in J#, Jscript, Visual Basic .Net or C#. The framework can produce data-driven, interactive web applications across the internet. There are a plethora of controls such as buttons, text boxes and labels for manipulating, configuring and assembling code for the creation of HTML pages.


Things driving .Net web developers crazy
Although the .Net framework offers numerous advantages for the web developers such as rapid development, rich controls, built in security and more, there are various things about .Net that drive web developers crazy. Let us discuss some of those things here:

• The .Net framework does not make room for convenient unit tests. There is more or less no support available for automatic unit testing using tools such as NUnit, which makes it difficult to go for test-driven development. Frameworks based on MVC such as ASP.NET MVC or Struts can perform better.


• At certain times, the view state can become exceptionally large or negatively affect the performance. Such a thing is more applicable to the server controls that are more complicated.


• Rounded corners, gradients and shadows need to be added for each element on the web page.


• The same PSD has to be used as a starting point for each and every object. The unused layers need to be hidden but not deleted and the PSD should be minimum 100MB.


• Same dimensions should never be used on elements, but each element needs to be given a distinct font color and size.


• A modal window needs to be added and it is good if a major portion of the site (around 50%) gets developed in the modal window.


• Adding a Facebook Connect button might seem easy, but it can be quite challenging for the .Net web developer.


• When ‘Lorem Ipsum’ text is used instead of real copy, very often it so happens that the reserved area on the website is not big enough to accommodate the real text.


• Once a page is complete, it becomes a challenging task for a developer to come up with a totally different version of the same page. Although the changes might be necessary or essential for user-experience, it is an arduous to completely change the page.


• When PSD folders or layers are not present in an organized manner, it becomes difficult for .Net web developers to go about their task.


• It is not convenient to work with PSD pages that are randomly merged.


• When developers are asked to incorporate some fancy functionality, the same can become challenging although not impossible.


• Many enterprises make the blunder of not showing the layout to the .Net developers at the initial stage but the same is done once the client views and approves it. Hence there is no scope for the developer to suggest necessary changes for convenient development.


• Designing a form becomes difficult in case there is space constraint. It might lead to errors.


• In case bug tracking software is not used in the initial QA stages and the changes are pointed out to the developer at a later stage, it becomes an arduous task for the developer to implement the same.

Design and development of new applications as well as maintenance of new applications become convenient with the help of .Net framework. By overcoming the challenges that drive them crazy, motivated energetic and flexible developers can indeed come up with outstanding websites and applications. This is what makes .net application development hugely popular.

We provide .net development services. If you would like to know more about our certified asp.net developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

10 Topmost Reasons Why You Should Use Selenium

So far as the software industry is concerned, after any product arrives at the manual testing stage, almost all the organizations consider automated testing to cut down on the cost that manual testing involves. For any project, companies are rapidly inclining towards open source automated testing tools rather than investing in commercial testing tools which come at a high price. With no investment for licensing, open source testing instruments come with significant features that enable the convenient automation of testing of web portals and software applications. Selenium is by far one of the most popular automated testing tools for websites. With the passage of time, Selenium is becoming more and more popular and it is the most preferred choice of organizations and automation testers for automated testing of web applications, applicable for the functionality as well as the GUI.

There are a number of reasons why organizations prefer to use Selenium for automated testing. Here we will discuss the top 10 reasons. But before that, let us have an overview of the available test packages and modes of Selenium.

Test Packages of Selenium

Selenium comprises a package of diverse test components mainly consisting of four main tools. Each of the tools has a definite role to play in supporting the development of automated testing pertaining to a web application.

• Selenium IDE: This is in fact an add-on feature for Mozilla Firefox. This is generally used for playback, record, debugging and edit of selenium scripts.

• Selenium RC: This is alternatively known as Selenium Remote Control and is utilized to run tests across various systems and browsers.

• Selenium Grid: It is capable of running diverse cases of Selenium RC at the same time. Selenium Grid facilitates distribution of tests across different browsers and machines so that parallel execution of the tests can be carried out.

• Selenium Webdriver: This is the latest version of Selenium which comprises a number of Selenium APIs.
  

Modes of Selenium

For execution of test suites and test cases, Selenium comes with the following three modes.

• Record-Playback mode: Within this mode, Selenium IDE can only be used for recording test scenarios with regards to test cases pertaining to Firefox. This offers a brilliant way to start off with writing tests as well as grouping the same together in order to build the test suite. It is possible to export the tests that are recorded to several programming languages; hence they can be tweaked and put within the testing framework. These test suites and test cases can then be replayed in order to check the validations and verifications or transported to Selenium Grid or RG for more tweaking.

• Selenium Remote Control Mode: Here, Selenium starts off manifold browsers one after the other, following which it runs the test cases that have been recorded and saved in the preferred language. This promotes the enhancement of the test cases with the help of programming and looping techniques with the aim to cover all the necessary checks and test scenarios.

• Test Runner Mode: This mode involves the recording and replaying of test cases as HTML tables. It constitutes just another method for execution of Selenium RC and Selenium IDE test cases. Here, the test result reports are checked in cases they have not been already formatted.
  

10 Reasons Why Selenium is Great to Use

• Taking the other automation tools into consideration, Selenium has the capability to operate on almost every OS.

• Selenium is an open source testing tool and hence it serves for cost-effective automation testing.

• Selenium supports multiple languages such as Python, Pearl, Ruby, PHP, .NET (C#) and Java. You are required to be comfortable in just a single language in order to operate Selenium.

• One highly beneficial feature of Selenium is that the language used for building the program is independent of the language that the web application or website is using. This implies that the test script can be developed in any of the languages that Selenium supports.

• This testing tool supports a range of browsers like Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE 6, 7, 8 and Mozilla Firefox.

• Selenium has a very dynamic developer community that is backed by Google.

• So far as Selenium is concerned, we have a number of robust methods for location of elements such as CSS, Xpath, DOM, and so on.

• With Selenium, it is convenient to implement frameworks that revolve around Object oriented programming like Keyword Driven, Data driven and Hybrid.

• Selenium provides support for integration of open source frameworks like TestNG, JUnit, NUnit and so on.

• With the use of Selenium, it is possible to execute simultaneous tests leveraging various browsers on various machines. This is turn cuts down the time for test execution when a large project is in progress.

With its useful features, Selenium automation testing serves as a key tool for browser compatibility testing as well as system functional testing. It is indeed strong when compared to the available tools for automation testing and is very simple and flexible.

We provide selenium web application testing services. If you would like to discuss with an expert selenium tester from our team, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

Advantage of Conducting Automated Software Testing

With more and more companies launching new applications to target the expanding software market, the software development projects are becoming more complex and complicated. At the same time, the software developers have to work consistently in improving the user experience by fixing a variety of bugs, errors, mistakes and functions. Also, the software must perform smoothly in different environments to become successful. So, companies deploy the most effective software testing techniques to save time, money and effort.

The method of software testing also varies based on the nature and size of the project. Each company also has options to choose from a number of manual and automated software testing methods. But the automated web testing methods are hugely popular due to their flexible and easy-to-use nature. A software testing professional can use a set of flexible tools to run a testing script to accurately emulate the behavior of end-users.

You can even consider automating specific manual testing processes to avail several advantages. Based on the design and type of the software, you can use specialized tools to carry out functional, regression, stress, and exception or negative testing. Also, the tools can be used to ensure that the software performs smoothly under different circumstances and conditions. You can even decide the hardware or software that needs to be upgraded to improve the performance of the software.

Significant Advantage of Conducting Automated Software Testing

Easy to Perform Certain Test Repeatedly: Software testing professionals often have to administer certain tests repeatedly to cover all bases. The complex nature of the project will require the testers to put a huge amount of test and efforts to perform the tests again and again manually. Further, the manual test will make it difficult for testers to find the glitches and bugs in the application. Most software testing tools allow testers to configure the tests once based on certain parameters, and use the configuration to administer the test over and over without putting any extra effort.

Smooth Running of Loads of Tests and Cases: Nowadays, most software application projects are divided into different modules. So a large project will require the testing professionals to test the application on a regression basis. The automated test scripts also have to be written from the scratch by keeping in mind a large number of tests or cases that will run and rerun consistently. As the running and rerunning of test scripts manually needs a huge amount of time, it may prolong the project completion date. So many testers use testing tools to easily execute the test scripts till they are sure about the accuracy of test results.

Saves Your Time and Resources: Most companies, nowadays, deploy a team of software testing professional to make the project a success. So you have to invest more time and resources to test a software application thoroughly. But you can always save both time and resources by automating the testing process. As the test scripts can be reused to target several user interfaces, and the tests can be administered in less time, you can easily develop a quality application, while saving funds. Also, the automated testing tools can save you money by reducing the resources needed to conduct regression tests.

Make Your Software more Reliable: With companies upgrading their applications regularly, it has become essential for you to ensure that your software is 100% error-free. Also, you need to develop an application that can run smoothly on major web browsers, operating systems and devices. You can choose from several software testing tools to suit the nature of your application. Each testing tool further allows you to build a suite of test to cover all features and functionality of the application. The comprehensive testing can emulate user behavior accurately that will contribute toward boosting the efficiency, performance and reliability of the application.

Reusability of the Test: A tester has options to choose from a variety of test automation tools. However, the prices of the testing tools will vary based on the expected features and functionality. The advanced tools come with record and playback feature. You can use the software simply by moving and clicking the mouse. Also, you can use the click buttons to directly check the user experience. At the same time, some tools also allow you to use image templates to emulate the user behavior accurately. These features make it easier for software testers to reuse a single test script to administer application testing.

Quick Testing of Cross-Platform Applications: Each successful application has to be compatible with major operating systems and devices. So most companies, nowadays, develop cross-platform software applications. If you are developing a web application, it must run on major web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Your testing team has to spend a huge amount of time and efforts to ensure that the features and functionality of the application is supported by popular web browsers and operating systems. But you can easily test the performance of cross-platform applications by automating the testing process.

We provide qtp automation testing services. If you would like to know more about our expert automation testers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

What should your Testing Checklist Contain?

Before we make our websites public we must get things right. I have jot down a few points in my checklist to keep in mind a website must have before it is published to the web. Any site more or less must be usable and attractive and should explain its presence as well. Common problems that designers face by addressing their own sites in a Usability checklist of sorts. We work on many things like interacting with requirements of projects with clients, designing prototypes, coding, programming and testing – there’s a lot to keep track of and a lot to make sure gets done for the completion of a successful project.

Points to remember for a Testing Checklist:

• ID: is the identity of the site, it is usually found at the top left of a page right next to navigation of any kind. It’s also very important that the ID links back to the home page of the site, or at least add a “Home” link in the navigation on sub pages of a site.

• Page Name: is as important as the Site ID, the Name of any page being browsed needs to be made very clear to the user. It must define the page content or what the page wants to narrate. It must be framing the content unique to that page, prominently placed and styled to show that it is indeed the page heading. The Page Name is often the largest text on the page which clearly emphasizes its importance.If the name of a page matches the text linking to the page, a user will have no trouble identifying what page they are on.

• Navigation: is a must for a site, and it must be constant throughout all the pages. So that users can quickly browse through whatever information at a glance without any usability issue. There are two types of navigation primary and secondary ones.

• Primary Navigation: contains the parent pages of the site, main parts of the site. It is a top level navigation, explains to the user what the main sections of the site are and helps them get to those sections. Usually the Primary Navigation is a part of a site's global navigation.

• Secondary Navigation: divides primary navigation into subsections. Tertiary Navigation divides those subsections into even more sections and so on. Structure your navigation by keeping it simple in all the pages of the site. So that people can easily run around the sub-menus and main menus.

• Utilities: are parts of your site that don't really get connected to the primary sections of your site. Examples of utilities include: About us, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, etc. Be sure to include the most important ones for your site in a place where your viewers will easily find them, but don’t make your navigation too crowded by including lots of utility navigation links.

• Navigation by Search: There are users who don't have time and search for the pages which they need to focus on so they directly search for those pages only which they need. It is the second form of navigation pretty much every site should have is navigated by searching. Some users prefer browsing, some prefer searching, so it’s usually wise to include both.

• Current Location: We must highlight the buttons we are currently working on though a nice page title isn’t quite enough to tell a viewer where they are on a website. So that users are aware of where they are in relation to everything else.Signs all over large airports that clearly mark your location as well as locations of all the other important places.

• Highlighting: In many ways a website is like a large airport. The viewer doesn’t really know how big the site is and without some sort of grounding a user will have a tough time placing themselves on the map. Some sites highlight the section of a site a user is about to explain to them where they are, while other sites may use breadcrumb navigation or other means to show the viewer where they are on the site. Perhaps one is more useful than the other in certain situations, but the point is a site should somehow always show the user where they are in relation to everything else.

• Tagline: Taglines are a great way to explain the purpose of a site to a user quickly. They are useful because it gets the messages across. It’s just a small, well crafted summary about your site that’s shown right next to the Site ID, usually no more than a few words. Taglines are not mottos which describe the motivation or intention, but instead descriptions that convey the point of something. They are critical because people scan websites, especially first time visitors who are just beginning to understand your company.

• Clear Visual Page: We must not forget the fact that content is the king of any website. It should be clear and precise. Content on a page isn’t something to be taken lightly. Newspapers as a classic example of how a content hierarchy should appear online. Well constructed pages using clear headings to organize content and subheadings to make that content easier to read and appear. User should not get lost inside page, content need to be relevant up to date and well organized and should be written uniquely for each page of your website and should be written as if you are talking to the customers.

A very good website must engage the customers spend more time on their pages engages the readers, increase search engine rankings and traffic and promotes the likelihood of quality links from other sites. For a successful website it must attract both the visitors and search engines. Testing plays a critical role in the development of any web site and its long-term maintenance. While smaller web sites—especially those with more limited budgets—may not need to follow the formal testing procedures that are required for large-scale, commercial web sites, every site needs to be thoroughly tested to ensure that it’s error-free, user-friendly, accessible and standards compliant.

The Testing checklist above will help you test your site both during development and after. We must crib for a very good website liked by all and gets more demanding by them. All information should be up-to-date, with new technology being used and new techniques. Planning, Design/Layout, Usability/Accessibility, Content, Website Optimization/Standards and Search Engine Optimization/Marketing these play a vital role in a site's success. If we are alert in these areas while developing our own site, then nothing can beat us from being successful and more wanting among the professional and novice users. So if you are looking to hire offshore software testing partners, make sure they follow these testing checklists.

We provide web application testing services. If you would like to know more about our expert software testers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.