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Website testingAny test determines the presence or absence of a given characteristic. Although this definition is generic it can be applied to website testing in that website testing is testing that seeks to determine the degree to which the following quality attributes are present:-
These attributes are just a subset of what characteristics of a website can be tested for. Most website owners would test for functionality and usability, but performance and some of the other factors can also be tested for. When testing for functionality a functional specification of the website is required. The functional specification is a list of what functions the website should perform and a description of these functions. Without a functional specification there is nothing to test against. For websites that provide information or are content based there is no need for a functional specification as the only function of the website is to present the information. Testing a content only website would mainly be focused on usability testing, i.e. navigation and readability of the content, since the functional requirements are trivial. Strictly speaking website testing is a part of overall software quality control.
The relationship between website design and website testingHaving defined website testing as an activity that determines the presence of a website characteristic, and website design as the activity of planning for those website characteristics, there is a clear relationship between website design and testing. Testing can actually be done at the design stage, and in practice this saves a lot of time, in that if the overall structure of the website is documented then a walkthrough can take place to determine the number of clicks to achieve a given website goal or arrive at a certain page of content. This walkthrough is in fact a usability test of the design. Testing the actual code and functions of the website clearly needs to wait until the website, or a part of it, is built. Design tests and code (or implementation) tests are two types of website testing that define when in the website development process a test can be made. Other types of testing include what characteristic is being tested for (the common software characteristics are listed above) and whether or not the test is manual or automated. Manual versus automated website testing
Website functional testing can be automated and this is mainly used in regression testing. Regression testing refers to tests that determine whether or not previously working functions still work after a change has been made to another part of the website. Regression testing is checking whether or not changes in another part on the website have negative impacts dues to changes. Functional regression tests can be automated and there are number of open source tools that enable this.
For the most part performance testing is automated but performance testing usually tests the server side of a website. If the website provides .asp, jsp or other cgi's to provide the website functions (including data processing) then this activity can be simulated via automated tools and the impact on server resources of a given number of users can be determined.
Most usability testing and functional testing for new features or modified features is tested manually.
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