Test-Give The Best

Tools to test design of a web application

2012-03-30T15:13:00.003+05:30

I have already discussed what to check when we are testing the design of a web application.
That post is design and usability testing .
Here I'm going to tell the tools which help us in design testing.

Color Check
For checking the color in RGB or Hexacode format

Colorzilla Add-On in Firefox

Color picker/Eye Dropper Extensions of chrome

Color Picker in Windows

Size
To check the size (in pixels) of different sections of web page

Measure It Add On in Firefox and chrome

Font Check
Font finder for checking the font style and complete details of text position in the web page.

Font finder in firefox

ContextFont Add Ons in Firefox. Select the text whose font needs to be checked then right click. Its font will be shown there.

Font editor in Chrome helps in editing the font in the web page to check which font will work and look better.
Check for below image containing F after installing Font editor in Chrome.

Check this link for different conversions of font in pixels,points,ems and percentage.

http://reeddesign.co.uk/test/points-pixels.html

Opening a link of one browser in another browser without opening another browser

2012-03-29T12:46:00.003+05:30

If you have a web application which has many links and you want to test all the links in the same browser and also in another browser. What would be the default thing which you would do? You will copy the URL and open another browser and paste it. Then check whether that link will open properly or not.

This is fine until you have only few easily countable links to do. What if there are many hyperlinks and copy paste work of them is very tedious. You just drop out doing such things and give up because you don’t want to do it.

Here are the solutions for it.

Use Firefox. Firefox has an Add On “Browser View Plus”.
Install the Add on.
Then go to Tools ">" AddOns And select Options in “Browser View Plus” section.
Enter the browsers in which you want to open the links. That’s it.
Go to any link and right click on it. You will find “Open With” option which has the browsers list which you have mentioned in the Option dialogue box.
See the below image which has the link “Open link with”.
It shows the different browsers installed and are available in the drop down option for selection.
Click option “Options” to add more browsers to it.

Install this and go to View of the web page. We can find options to open the web page in already installed browsers.

Design and Usability testing

2012-02-02T15:49:00.003+05:30

When you go to meet a person for some purpose…. and if he has got a scary and unfriendly appearance. What would be your next step? Dropping the idea of meeting him and searching for another person, who can receive you properly and serve your purpose perfectly with good responses. Am I Right?

Now in above statement, think that you are a customer and you visited a web site. And website is the another person who is not so approachable. Here the approach of the web site is design and performance of the site. Visitor will switch to another web site if he is not pleased by its appearance, its performance, its usability. Visitors will explore the site more if they are satisfied. After all this, user tries to check if his purpose is solved or not.
Testing functionality, end to end flow, performance is normally done for all web applications. But, what about design and usability testing?
In this post I’m going to explain factors to be considered to test a design of an application.

Considerations to test design and usability of web application

Home Page
1. Home page is expected to have a logo and major contents of the application.
2. It would be better if logo is continued as favicon.
3. Landing page should not have more number of images of large size. Page takes more time to load and visitor never hesitates to switch to another website as they will be more impatient.
4. After loading of the page, purpose of the web site should be mentioned very clearly in a line or so. This makes the visitor to decide whether he has entered into correct web site or not.
Content
1. Color & Font style
  1. Soothing color and background should be selected.
  2. Font should not be scary but it should be readable and understandable
  3. Consistency should be maintained for the font used for menus, buttons and other content.
  4. It should be easily accessible to users with disabilities like color blinded.
2. Hyperlinks
  1. Color of visited and unvisited links should be easily differentiable.
  2. Avoid too many links.
  3. Color used for links should not be used for any other text part of the content to highlight.
  4. Also avoid link navigating to same page or looping the visited pages.
3. Forms & Sections
  1. Main sections for which the visitor visits the site should be occupied in the body of the page. And rest low priority factors come in left, right, bottom sections of the page.
  2. Sections should not be overlapping or under covered with another section.
  3. Visitor should not keep checking for the fields to enter any data.
  4. Fields should be properly aligned.
Images / Graphics
1. Logo should be included for the error messages so that user gets an idea about error source.
2. It would be good if the images on front page match the purpose of the site.
3. Too many flash images make the user confused about the content of the application.
4. Consistency in complete web application is expected.
5. Too many flash images or advertisements turn them off.
Page usage & Navigation
1. Web page should be optimally utilized and should not have blank sections or irrelevant details.
2. Too much of scrolling should be avoided.
3. Structure of the complete web application should be clear and easily navigating.
4. Sitemap should be available to know where the visitor is and how he can go to another section.
Additional
1. Check if your design is compatible with most of the browsers or not. Check this post Browser Compatibility testing manually
2. Help should be provided to provide details of the page and its purpose and usage.
3. Search facility should be implemented in the application to avoid more number of navigations.
4. If there is any information which user might feel that he needs to take a print out like an article. Then provide a print option in the page itself. It should print it as a page and not as web page. Moreover it should contain the logo of the web application.
5. Error messages should properly guide user to correct them easily. Instead of saying “please correct below fields in red”. Say what is wrong and what values are not allowed in those fields. This will help them to quickly correct their mistakes.
6. Acknowledgement and confirmation messages should be displayed wherever required.

And last but not least…tools which help in testing them better. In my next post I will explain about the tools which can be used for testing the design of a web application. So tester’s just feel happy and excited whenever you are given a job of testing the design. It just needs tools and bit of creativity also.

Browser Compatibility testing OR Cross Browser testing

2011-11-17T12:40:00.008+05:30

Browser compatibility testing which is also called as cross browser testing, multi browser testing , in simple words, is testing a application in different browsers and also in different versions of browsers. This task is mostly automated because it is very difficult to perform it manually. But here I’m going to provide a series of steps which will help you give more test coverage by performing the cross browser testing manually. At the same time there are many hurdles when you start testing a application in different browsers. For example chrome will not let you install different versions of it in your system, similarly with Firefox. So here we go for a quick round up of how to test a web application in different browsers with different versions without struggling.

Points to be remembered before performing such testing

Note down all the browsers along with their versions in which application needs to be tested. Check the minor versions in them and reduce the count by removing minor versions. For suppose if Firefox version 3.5 and Firefox 4.0 does not have any major changes then select any one of them. Reducing the number of browsers will reduce lot of effort.
Consider these scenarios as part of your basic test plan
1. Test major css (cascading style sheet) issues
2. Check for end to end flow
3. Check the user interface issues
4. Display of controls, pop ups, flash images. Alignment of the controls also. Font size font color.
5. JavaScript features
6. Performance or page load time
7. Browsers with different screen resolutions
8. Html validation
If a tool is to be selected for cross browser testing, then check following factors in the tool.
1. Is it an open source?
2. Does it provide different versions of at least popularly used browsers Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome?
3. Does it provide screenshot for the URL which we provide? Or does it let us navigate through different links in the application?
4. Please check “Best articles on Cross Browser Testing” section at the end of this post for the list of tools which does cross browser testing and also main features of each tool.

Cross browser testing Automated

If any tool is allowed to be selected then here the list of best tools which can be used for such things

Cross browser testing manually

Manually testing the web application in various browsers will be a hectic one as we cannot have more than 1 version of a browser in our system. So here are some solutions as to how we can overcome this hurdle in different browsers.

Internet Explorer :
1. Developer tool: Open the internet explorer and click F12, You will find a section opened at the bottom of the browser. Select Browser mode in it. If IE9 is installed in your system then you can check out IE7, IE8 and IE9 in the list of “Browser modes”. Load a web page, it is displayed in IE9 then select browser mode IE8 page will get refreshed and will show how it works in IE8.
2. Another option in case of internet explorer is IETester. IETester is a web browser which allows you to test in different versions of IE.
Firefox :
a.Utilu: It is a tool which will allow installing different versions of Firefox based on your selection at the time of installation. It can allow more than 5 versions of Firefox to be opened at the same time to execute a web application. Enter the web application URL in one page before start up and all the versions of Firefox will open with the same url and then we can continue our testing. Sounds cooool right.
Google Chrome :
Chrome will never allow to us to install the old versions and use them for testing. As soon as we open the about popup to see its version it updates its version to the latest. And this creates pain in the neck.To avoid this here are some tips.

Stop Chrome from getting its version updated without notice

Go to cmd prompt and enter MSConfig. System Configuration popup gets opened.
Select start up tab and check that “Googleupdate.exe” is available in the list or not. It should be present if chrome is installed in your system.
Uncheck the exe file so that it does not get updated every now and then.
Reopen Chrome.

Another option to stop from chrome getting updated without user permission is :

Go to cmd prompt and enter Regedit. It opens the registry editor.
Go to folder HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > Software > Google > Update.
Add a new DWORD value named: DisableAutoUpdateChecksCheckboxValue. Set it to 1 to disable automatic updates.
If you want to enable it, set it to 0.
Close the Regedit.exe application.
Reopen Chrome.
Here is an important site for chrome fans….

Best articles on Cross Browser testing

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/04/cross-browser-testing-a-detailed-review-of-tools-and-services/
http://designm.ag/resources/browser-testing/
http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/best-cross-browser-testing-tools-to-ease-your-browser-compatibility-testing-efforts/

Scrum Methodology - Quick Info

2011-09-27T15:53:00.007+05:30

It is one of the unique methodologies of agile methodology.

Scrum

It is an iterative, incremental framework for project management. It is a loose set of guidelines that govern the development process of a product, from its design stages to its completion. It aims to cure some common failures of the typical development process like a. chaos due to changing requirements, unrealistic estimates of time, cost and quality of the product.

Meetings

1. Daily Scrum meeting or daily stand up meeting: agenda: what is done, what is planned for today, what are the problems in accomplishing the goal?

2. Sprint planning meeting : Before each sprint cycle (7-30 days)starts, prepare sprint backlog, timelines,

3. Sprint review meeting: done at the end of sprint cycle, review work completed and not completed, demo the work completed, do not demo incomplete work, 4 hour time will be allocated.

4. Sprint retrospective meeting: done at the end of the sprint cycle. Questions are asked - what went well during the sprint and what could be improved in the next sprint. Make continuous process improvements

Sprint Burn Down Chart

1. Depicts the total Sprint Backlog hours remaining per day.

2. Shows the estimated amount of time to release.

3. Ideally should burn down to zero to the end of the Sprint.

Scrum roles

1. Product Owner

2. Scrum Team

3. Scrum Master

Click below for diagrammatic representation of scrum workflow and also for traditional diagram of scrum workflow

Scrum Work flow

Input Data Validation

2011-08-24T17:51:00.012+05:30

Every web application is expected have at least one submit form. Data entered in form is transferred as input to database or to any other application and will decide the output. So, input data plays a very important role in retrieving the output data.

Such data needs to be validated by the code. And tester has the responsibility of validating such data.

At this point tester thinks about how can the validations be done and what type of data should be provided to validate the input field. Test data needs to be created and passed to the form through the automation tool or manually.

Here are few steps or guide lines to validate the data.

Let’s consider a sample form which acts as input to signing in as new member in a social networking site like facebook. It contains different types of input fields – Numeric, String, Alpha Numeric, date, preset values (from drop downs or check boxes), file uploads and Email addresses.

Name: String input field

Password : Alphanumeric field

Age: Numeric input field

Address: Alpha numeric

Date: Date of Birth

Email Address: Email field

Profile Image: Photo of the member: File upload

Validations which can be performed on such forms are

1. Name :

a. Should start with letter

b. Should not contain numbers.(unless proposed)

c. Should contain string characters only.

d. Can contain underscore (_) ,hyphen (-) and single quotation (')

e. Can contain space but along with string characters

2. Password :

a. Should be encrypted with any special character and should not be visible even to the person who is entering it. Generally it gets skipped from encrypting when it is passed through any testing tool.

b. Can contain string characters, numerical and special characters.

c. Should not contain only spaces

d. Length factor should be tested.

3. Age :

a. Should start with number

b. Should not contain characters

c. Should contain numbers only

d. Should not contain special characters and spaces also

e. Should not have all zeroes or single 0

4. Address :

a. Can contain string characters, numeric, special characters.

b. Should contain only spaces

c. Should not contain junk data, it should be meaningful

5. Date :

a. Can contain numbers

b. Can contain special characters like hyphen (-),slash(/) depending on format accepted

c. Can contain string characters depending on format

d. Some cases should not accept future date like for date of birth we cannot put future date.

e. Some cases should not accept past date like for any activity which is planned for future date.

6. Email Address :

a. Can contain numeric, string and special characters

b. Should not contain only special characters or numbers

c. Should not contain only spaces

d. Should contain at least one at symbol (@)

e. Should contain at least one dot (.)

7. Profile image :

a. Should be a path to the file which is to be uploaded

b. File should be existing

c. File format should be acceptable with the input field

d. File size should be in the limits mentioned

8. Apart from above we should also check the following in the input provided

a. Length acceptable in the field

b. Minimum length criteria is accepted or not

c. Is the field mandatory ---then input is must and no spaces and all zeroes should be accepted.

d. More number of spaces provided at the end or in between or at start of the data should be trimmed.

e. Data in the form of SQL queries should not be accepted as they are provided to break the security system by hackers.

f. Date which has HTML tags should not be provided. As they might be interpreted in different form when submitted as input data.

Points to be noted by developer when submit forms are designed

1. Highlight the mandatory fields either by asterisk (*) or text “Mandatory” or coloring the text box in differentiating color.

2. Mention the acceptable format near the date field.

3. Mention the max length for the input fields which has limit restrictions.

4. SQL queries should be identified and rejected.

5. Same with HTML tags, they should be identified before passing the data.

6. Errors should be in red. Or fields which have incorrect data should be highlighted in red.

7. Provide the error message near each error field. Or provide all the errors in one section of the page mentioning the data field names clearly.

More Info

For Developers, these links below will help you a lot about what should be considered for data validation.

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Data_Validation

http://www.clerkendweller.com/2008/11/21/Free-Text-Form-Field-Data-Validation

Bloggers day

2011-08-23T11:38:00.000+05:30

Lets celebrate Bloggers day on August 31st.

Get ready with the 5 new blogs which you like to recommend to others.

Why is August 31st selected as bloggers day?

August 31st means '3108' which resembles 'Blog'.

For more details of it visit the site http://www.blogday.org/

Test More n more

2011-07-28T14:49:00.000+05:30

Testing it is just not a word but it is that act which gives value to the product developed by the developers. It is given more significance in present days but that value needs to be enhanced. Why, let’s see few examples of apps which were not tested perfectly and are in market with defect.

These points are based on an excellent article “Perhaps they should have tested more” presented by Joe in his blog. Thanks Joe.

1. Apple Iphones: Have IPhones failed to make the Daylight Saving Time transition yet again? iOS 4.1 users in Europe reported that their alarm clocks failed to account for the time change due to the end of Daylight Savings, which shifted their clocks back an hour at 2 am this morning. As a result, their alarms went off an hour too late.

2. Skype: Supernodes not so super? Skype once again had a worldwide outage related to software problems in their supernodes

3. Google Docs: A recently-introduced bug in Google Docs caused some documents to be shared with users who were specifically not authorized to see them.

4. Microsoft Zune : Zune 30s all freezing up at once

5. Target: National retailer Target Corp. has been shortchanging customers for months when they use some manufacturers' coupons.

6. JP Morgan Chase : Millions of customers who bank online with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. lost electronic access to their accounts as the company's website suffered a severe outage starting Monday at 11:00 PM ET.

7. Apple iPhone4: Recently, Apple iPhone 4 users have been complaining about poor reception when the phone was held certain ways. Without debating if the diminished reception is real or not, Apple has now figured out that the algorithm for calculating the number of bars to display has been wrong for a long time!

8. Google Android: Who knew that simply texting the word "reboot" would actually cause a phone to reboot?

9. Apple: A critical bug in Apple's Snow Leopard OSX 10.6 reportedly can wipe out users' account information when they open and close "guest" accounts.

10. McAfee: Due to a faulty virus definition update, machines running Windows XP Service Pack 3 using the faulty definitions will delete svchost.exe, causing many key Windows services to fail to start. This Windows file is being mistakenly detected as W32/wecorl.a. Failure to start svchost.exe causes Windows to automatically reboot.

11. 6Pm.com: 6pm.com, the sister site of Zappos, messed up the coding of business rules in their pricing engine, resulting in undercharging customers to the tune of approximately $1.6 Million.

12. StarBucks: For a couple of days in May, coffee giant Starbucks ended up double charging about 1 million of their U.S. and Canadian customers.

13. TESCO: Giant UK supermarket chain Tesco has been unable to take money at a number of its stores following technical problems affecting its tills.

14. Manitoba Public Insurance: Everyone knows that a typo is a low-severity, low-priority bug, right?
Well as Manitoba Public Insurance learned, sometimes a typo which slips through into production can be a rather expensive proposition - both monetarily, and politically as well.

15. Zecco: On April 1, 2009, online brokerage site Zecco increased about 1% of their customers' Buying Power balances by millions of dollars. Some customers thought it was an April fool’s joke. The real reason wasn't quite as funny.

16. Skynet: It's no surprise that self-aware systems will always turn on their creators - anyone could see that coming. But buggy robots? There's just no excuse. A robot forgets who she is.

17. DropBox: During a recent code push, web-based file storage firm Dropbox introduced a bug in their authentication mechanism - allowing unprotected access to accounts for four hours.

18. Netflix: Still waiting for your copy of Rambo, 27 Dresses, or The Bucket List to arrive from Netflix? You may be waiting a while, and you may not be alone.

For more details on each bug visit Joe’s blog

http://strazzere.blogspot.com/search/label/Perhaps%20They%20Should%20Have%20Tested%20More

Google search can now search for snapshot

2011-06-15T12:06:00.000+05:30

New feature of snapshot search is coming up in Google search. See this link

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/google-search-by-image-use-a-snapshot-as-your-search-query/

Check for the camera icon in Google search page, which indicates that this feature is available for use.

Waiting for the plug-in to be available.

Do you know which is the first bug found

2011-05-30T15:43:00.001+05:30

The invention of the term "bug" is often erroneously attributed to Grace Hopper, who publicized the cause of a malfunction in an early electromechanical computer.

A typical version of the story is given by this quote:

“

In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark-II and Mark-III (The Harvard Mark II was an electromechanical computer built at Harvard University under the direction of Howard and was finished in 1947. It was financed by the United States navy). Operators traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. Stemming from the first bug, today we call errors or glitch's in a program a bug.

”

Hopper was not actually the one who found the insect, as she readily acknowledged. The date in the log book was 9 September 1947, although sometimes erroneously reported as 1945. The operators who did find it, including William "Bill" Burke, later of the Naval Weapons Laboratory, Dahlgren, Virginia were familiar with the engineering term and, amused, kept the insect with the notation "First actual case of bug being found." Hopper loved to recount the story^. This log book is on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, complete with moth attached.

While it is certain that the Harvard Mark II operators did not coin the term "bug", it has been suggested that they did coin the related term, "debug”. Even this is unlikely, since the Oxford English Dictionary entry for "debug" contains a use of "debugging" in the context of air-plane engines in 1945.

See the first bug picture

CMMi and TMMi

2011-04-28T11:50:00.004+05:30

Many heard about CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration)

But that subsets all points of development and testing. Focus is more on development rather than quality activities. What about the quality which actually adds value to the project.

Here comes TMMi (Test Maturity Model Integration)

Quality and testing which is given low preference sometimes than development, needs a change. And here is this foundation which actually created TMMi and I guess IT industries need to start creating a space for TMMI along with CMMi.

Please check the site of TMMi foundation here

http://www.tmmifoundation.org/html/tmmiorg.html

To know its impact read these articles

1. Business impact of TMMi

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/02/16/245464/The-business-impact-of-TMMi.htm

2. HBOs turns to TMM for software testing

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/05/19/230703/HBOS-turns-to-TMM-for-software-testing.htm

Strip off Html tags from excel

2011-04-12T14:51:00.004+05:30

When data is exported from any web page into excel or from any other sources into excel. It gets copied with html tags. This is making it difficult to read it. If there are few rows then we can remove them manually but if we there are more number of rows then we can go for below steps.

Follow these steps:

1. Open up the VBE with Alt+F11.

2. Locate your workbook in the top left Project Explorer window. Right-click on your workbook and choose Insert>Module.

3. Paste the below given code in to the code module that will open.

4. Go back to Excel, select the cells you want to clean and activate the macro with Tools>Macro>Macros. (Macro can also be activated by clicking Run icon in Visual Basic).

5. All the html tags will be replaced.

6. But sometimes some cells will be displayed as hashes. In such cases, select the Description column again and select Home > Clear > Clear Formats. This will get back your description.

Code :

Sub RemoveTags()

Dim r As Range

Selection.NumberFormat = "@" 'set cells to text numberformat

With CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")

.Pattern = "\<.*?\>"

.Global = True

For Each r In Selection

r.Value = Replace(.Replace(r.Value, ""), " ", " ")

r.Value = Replace(.Replace(r.Value, ""), "<", "<")

r.Value = Replace(.Replace(r.Value, ""), ">", ">")

Next r

End With

End Sub

How to test search functionality

2011-04-05T13:52:00.002+05:30

Every web application by default will contain search feature in it. Many search engines’ main functionality is search feature.

The parameters to be considered while developing this feature or testing this feature are not limited. There are many factors which should be looked in when checking the coverage and usability of the search text box in the application.

Preparation before testing the search functionality

1. Note down the valid input details for the search feature.

2. Find out the minimum and maximum range.

3. Find out the depth of the search – document search, word in a document, image search

4. Should document search display the size of the document also? Similarly for image?

5. Any advanced search features like document or image type selection to refine the search are available?

6. General set of input which can be given are

a. A-Z

b. a-z

c. 0-9

d. { [ ( ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ` | \ : ” ; ’ < > ? , . / * - + ) ] }

e. Blank spaces

Work with these inputs when testing the search functionality

1. Special set of data which can be tried as input are

a. 2 blank spaces – These should be trimmed and error message should be displayed

b. Blank spaces followed with special characters or numbers

c. Special set like a* should give the results for all characters starting with a.

d. Enter any sql query like “Select * from hello;” without quotes and with quotes.

e. Search for tags.

f. Search for hyperlinks should be performed.

2. Search for documents. For advanced search feature, search with different valid and invalid types of documents. Document size should also be looked at.

3. Search for images with their sizes, names and types.

4. Any input data entered should return proper error message guiding to enter the correct input.

5. Text in different panels of the page should be searched. For example if left panel of the web page contains menus and hyperlinks. Hyperlinks in that area should be searched properly. If menus are also in scope then they should also appear in the search results.

6. Search response time should be checked.

7. Try pressing “Enter” key instead of clicking “Search” button.

8. Try searching in the page where a part of the page has form with Submit button.

Search results testing

DO not ignore the search results just because you got the results.

1. Check number of results in each page.

2. Check the count of the search results displayed in the page.

3. Check if the search results are displayed by popularity or most viewed or any other criteria mentioned in the requirements.

4. Proper messages should be displayed when there are no results.

5. Each search result should contain one link and few lines containing the searched keyword. Link should navigate to the page where the keyword exists.

6. Searched keyword should be highlighted in the search results page and also in the page where the keyword exists.

7. Pagination of the search results should be tested.

8. Number of search results display and the count should also be tested.

Estimation of the test effort

2011-03-23T17:34:00.005+05:30

Estimation is the base step of any project. If it is not strong then the whole project and sometimes the client itself will be out of our hands.

It is not an easy task and not a difficult one too. Not every estimation is successful. Too much of estimation will lose the client and less estimation will scare the employee.

Balancing both and winning the project is what needs to be learned.

Here are the factors which should be considered before making estimation

1. Technical

a. Experience and Knowledge of test team in the technology which is used.

b. Type of application – web application, executable file, games or any other.

c. Technical dependencies (if development and testing team is not at one location).

d. Tools used and their flexibility

2. Functional

a. Number of requirements free zed

b. Number of critical functionalities

c. Types of testing done – User interface testing, cross browser testing, localization testing and many more.

3. Project level dependencies

a. Project Scope

b. Project methodology – Agile or Scrum

c. Estimation model used

d. Experience in previous project similar to this

e. “Fixed cost” and “Time and Material” project

f. Team size

Example estimation for a web application

1. Freezed requirements :

Let assume a web application has a feedback page which contains data fields and submit button.

It is a secured page.

It has to be checked for data validations.

Can opt for automation of the page.

Form submission should be tested.

2. Types of testing required - Security testing, data validation testing, functionality testing, User interface testing and user acceptability testing.

3. Tools - Can use any functional test tool like Winrunner.

4. Critical functionalities - Security of the page, form submission.

5. Minor functionalities - testing data fields display and validation.

Based on above factors we can prepare estimation for test effort.

Estimation sheet should contain

1. Module name / Major functionality name / page name (based on how the project is divided).

2. Test case preparation time

3. Time for gathering data if database testing is included

4. Test execution time

5. Bug logging time

6. Defect management time

7. Regression time (at the end of the modules list)

Total number days = Number of total hours calculated / (Number of working hours * Number of test resources)

Want to spell check and grammar check your complete web application

2011-03-17T15:53:00.002+05:30

Excellent tool to check spelling errors, grammar and broken links in complete web application.

If you want to crawl the entire web application and check for spelling mistakes, typo errors you do not need to check each page manually. Let your application be multi-lingual web application, but it can check for the spellings.

Here is a super tool for it Inspyder Software

Features at its best –

Check the spellings of the complete web application
Check the grammar mistakes of the complete web application
Check for the broken links
Lets you select any language as the dictionary against which spellings are compared.
Provides you to create a custom dictionary which contains a set of words which are not actually spelling mistakes in your application.
Provides good report based on your preferences.

Check the site http://www.inspyder.com for more features and tools of it.

Tips for testing multi-lingual web sites

2011-03-17T10:41:00.002+05:30

This is a article by: Inder P Singh(picked from a site)

These days a number of web sites are deployed in multiple languages. As companies perform more and more business in other countries, the number of such global multi-lingual web applications will continue to increase.

Testing web sites supporting multiple languages has its own fair share of challenges. In this article, I will share seven tips with you that will enable you to test the multi-lingual browser-based applications in a complete way:

Tip # 1 – Prepare and use the required test environment
If a web site is hosted in English and Japanese languages, it is not enough to simply change the default browser language and perform identical tests in both the languages. Depending on its implementation, a web site may figure out the correct language for its interface from the browser language setting, the regional and language settings of the machine, a configuration in the web application or other factors. Therefore, in order to perform a realistic test, it is imperative that the web site be tested from two machines – one with the English operating system and one with the Japanese operating system. You might want to keep the default settings on each machine since many users do not change the default settings on their machines.

Tip # 2 – Acquire correct translations
A native speaker of the language, belonging to the same region as the users, is usually the best resource to provide translations that are accurate in both meaning as well as context. If such a person is not available to provide you the translations of the text, you might have to depend on automated web translations available on web sites like wordreference.com and dictionary.com. It is a good idea to compare automated translations from multiple sources before using them in the test.

Tip # 3 – Get really comfortable with the application
Since you might not know the languages supported by the web site, it is always a good idea for you to be very conversant with the functionality of the web site. Execute the test cases in the English version of the site a number of times. This will help you find your way easily within the other language version. Otherwise, you might have to keep the English version of the site open in another browser in order to figure out how to proceed in the other language version (and this could slow you down).

Tip # 4 – Start with testing the labels
You could start testing the other language version of the web site by first looking at all the labels. Labels are the more static items in the web site. English labels are usually short and translated labels tend to expand. It is important to spot any issues related to label truncation, overlay on/ under other controls, incorrect word wrapping etc. It is even more important to compare the labels with their translations in the other language.

Tip # 5 – Move on to the other controls
Next, you could move on to checking the other controls for correct translations and any user interface issues. It is important that the web site provides correct error messages in the other language. The test should include generating all the error messages. Usually for any text that is not translated, three possibilities exist. The text will be missing or its English equivalent will be present or you will see junk characters in its place.

Tip # 6 – Do test the data
Usually, multi-lingual web sites store the data in the UTF-8 Unicode encoding format. To check the character encoding for your website in mozilla: go to View -> Character Encoding and in IE go to View -> Encoding. Data in different languages can be easily represented in this format. Make sure to check the input data. It should be possible to enter data in the other language in the web site. The data displayed by the web site should be correct. The output data should be compared with its translation.

Tip # 7 – Be aware of cultural issues
A challenge in testing multi-lingual web sites is that each language might be meant for users from a particular culture. Many things such as preferred (and not preferred) colors, text direction (this can be left to right, right to left or top to bottom), format of salutations and addresses, measures, currency etc. are different in different cultures. Not only should the other language version of the web site provide correct translations, other elements of the user interface e.g. text direction, currency symbol, date format etc. should also be correct.

As you might have gathered from the tips given above, using the correct test environment and acquiring correct translations is critical in performing a successful test of other language versions of a web site.

=========================================================================

Look at the tips for testing the web pages which are multi-lingual

http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/category/software-testing-tips-and-resources/

IE6 countdown started

2011-03-08T09:49:00.001+05:30

Many do not like using IE6, for such there is a news

IE6 countdown is coming to 1% from 6%.

Do your bit by joining the cause in http://www.theie6countdown.com

You also have a new and a great looking IE9 released. Enjoy working on it.

Extract all URLs in a web page

2011-03-01T15:09:00.002+05:30

Excellent way of extracting all URLs from a web page.
If you have a web page and you want to extract the URLs in complete web application, there is a way.
Go to http://www.web-max.ca/PHP/misc_23.php, enter the URL in the text box given at the end of the php code.
It crawls the entire web page and extracts all the URLs in the web pages and provides the list.
Copy and paste it in the excel.
Thanks for the Cool code.

Factors for link testing

2011-03-01T14:15:00.004+05:30

Link testing
Many feel its just clicking the links, but it is not so. It has many factors which are supposed to be checked when testing the links in any web application.

Factors for link testing

1. Check the link style- color,font,color when already visited
2. Check the tool tip for the link
3. Check the navigation of the link
- Navigating to a web page in same window
- Navigating to a web page in different window
- Opening a document in same page
- Opening a document in different window
- opening an image or video
4. Check the parameters saved in cookie if the application is localized
5. Any identification if it is an external link.
6. Performance of the link
7. Time taken for navigation of the link

There are many tools or link checkers which navigate through the complete web application and provide the list of breaking URLs.

I suggest Xenu link checker.

Observe these key factors when using link checker for testing links

1. Link checkers can take web page as input and local files also as input
2. When testing the links online, check if the link checker will crawl the complete web application or just consider the main page only.
3. What are the types of input the link checker can take - web page,excel
4. Does it have the option of excluding the external links
5. What types of output does it generate? - Excel,html file or any other
6. Does it provide the performance issues and time out issues also.

Google helps you search and receive search results through email

2011-02-21T12:06:00.001+05:30

To search and receive google search results through email. Just send an email to google@capeclear.com and enter the text of your query in the "Subject" line. You will receive the search results as email to your mail id.

Once you get the result for the searches... u can get the contents of a URL using the below feature!! To receive the web content of a url send email to web@pagegetter.com and subject should contain the URL whose content has to be fetched.
Thanks to the No-Internet and only MAILING community.

Check external links in excel

2011-02-18T17:10:00.004+05:30

I thought

Testing or checking the hyperlinks which are navigating to external web page is a tedious task.

Searched for a tool very seriously which can test all the hyperlinks in excel and produce a report of the broken links.

Did not found any tool which can take excel with hyperlinks as the input and produce report.

Requirement was - An excel is available with many hyperlinks. I need to check each link and prepare a report of which one is working and which one is not working.

Finally got a solution

1. Copy only links from the excel which are to be tested to new excel sheet.

2. New excel sheet should not have any labels or any cells containing values other than hyperlinks type.

3. Save the excel as web page.

4. It will be saved as .html page.

5. Input this html page to any link checker which takes the web page as input.

6. See that "checking local links" option is set in the link checker.

7. This HTML page should be given as a file input to link checker rather than giving it with http protocol.

8. Obviously you will get the report from the link checker.

9. If the link checker has the option to save the report in excel then its good and best for you.

Enjoy.............

Tips for testing multi-lingual web sites

2010-11-25T10:49:00.004+05:30

This is a article by: Inder P Singh(picked from a site)

These days a number of web sites are deployed in multiple languages. As companies perform more and more business in other countries, the number of such global multi-lingual web applications will continue to increase.

Testing web sites supporting multiple languages has its own fair share of challenges. In this article, I will share seven tips with you that will enable you to test the multi-lingual browser-based applications in a complete way:

Tip # 1 – Prepare and use the required test environment

If a web site is hosted in English and Japanese languages, it is not enough to simply change the default browser language and perform identical tests in both the languages. Depending on its implementation, a web site may figure out the correct language for its interface from the browser language setting, the regional and language settings of the machine, a configuration in the web application or other factors. Therefore, in order to perform a realistic test, it is imperative that the web site be tested from two machines – one with the English operating system and one with the Japanese operating system. You might want to keep the default settings on each machine since many users do not change the default settings on their machines.

Tip # 2 – Acquire correct translations

A native speaker of the language, belonging to the same region as the users, is usually the best resource to provide translations that are accurate in both meaning as well as context. If such a person is not available to provide you the translations of the text, you might have to depend on automated web translations available on web sites like wordreference.com and dictionary.com. It is a good idea to compare automated translations from multiple sources before using them in the test.

Tip # 3 – Get really comfortable with the application

Since you might not know the languages supported by the web site, it is always a good idea for you to be very conversant with the functionality of the web site. Execute the test cases in the English version of the site a number of times. This will help you find your way easily within the other language version. Otherwise, you might have to keep the English version of the site open in another browser in order to figure out how to proceed in the other language version (and this could slow you down).

Tip # 4 – Start with testing the labels

You could start testing the other language version of the web site by first looking at all the labels. Labels are the more static items in the web site. English labels are usually short and translated labels tend to expand. It is important to spot any issues related to label truncation, overlay on/ under other controls, incorrect word wrapping etc. It is even more important to compare the labels with their translations in the other language.

Tip # 5 – Move on to the other controls

Next, you could move on to checking the other controls for correct translations and any user interface issues. It is important that the web site provides correct error messages in the other language. The test should include generating all the error messages. Usually for any text that is not translated, three possibilities exist. The text will be missing or its English equivalent will be present or you will see junk characters in its place.

Tip # 6 – Do test the data

Usually, multi-lingual web sites store the data in the UTF-8 Unicode encoding format. To check the character encoding for your website in mozilla: go to View -> Character Encoding and in IE go to View -> Encoding. Data in different languages can be easily represented in this format. Make sure to check the input data. It should be possible to enter data in the other language in the web site. The data displayed by the web site should be correct. The output data should be compared with its translation.

Tip # 7 – Be aware of cultural issues

A challenge in testing multi-lingual web sites is that each language might be meant for users from a particular culture. Many things such as preferred (and not preferred) colors, text direction (this can be left to right, right to left or top to bottom), format of salutations and addresses, measures, currency etc. are different in different cultures. Not only should the other language version of the web site provide correct translations, other elements of the user interface e.g. text direction, currency symbol, date format etc. should also be correct.

As you might have gathered from the tips given above, using the correct test environment and acquiring correct translations is critical in performing a successful test of other language versions of a web site.

=========================================================================

Look at the tips for testing the web pages which are multi-lingual

http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/category/software-testing-tips-and-resources/

How actually it happens............................?

2010-10-25T15:57:00.002+05:30

While working on the computer, u get many questions in your mind like.....

How screensaver works?
How Computer hardware works?
How authentication is done?

For such type of questions just get into http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/tech
i'm sure u gonna thank me for this info

Want to know about extensions

2010-10-25T14:48:00.002+05:30

Just go to this site
www.filesuffix.com

Software Test cycle

2010-03-05T12:36:00.001+05:30

Requirements analysis
Checking for the number of Modules in the requirement document
Preparing requirement traceability matrix and checking for the sufficiency of the requirements
Gather the doubts about the requirements from the document and getting them clarified from the client
Test plan preparation
Preparation of functional test requirements
Dividing the test requirements into test cases
Checking for the data required for the test case
Classifying the test case into small or medium or complex
Calculation of the time and effort required for the test case
Test effort estimation
Classification of test cases into small, medium and complex
Analyzing the time and effort required based on the type of test case.
Test case preparation
Preparation of test case title, steps to execute, gathering data for the test case if required, expected result and actual result.
Test case execution
Checking if the test environment is perfect by doing smoke test. Then proceeding for the test execution.
If the smoke test is success. Executing the test case as the steps to execute are written.
If the smoke test failed. Reporting the high severity error immediately after thorough checking and proceeding after confirmation received from the client.
Making note of the defects in the defect tracking tool along with the
i. Image if possible
ii. Actual steps executed
iii. Actual result occurred
iv. Data used for testing
v. Number of occurrences of the defect
vi. URL if possible
Defect management
Making note of the number of defects along with URL, environment, date, time, and number of defects and person who produced the defect.
Defects should be reported to the client and should be declared as bug when confirmed as defect.
Provide a severity and priority to the bug and assign it to the correct developer based on client’s instructions.
Try to reproduce the same bug in the next environment based on client’s instructions.
Change the status of the bug accordingly and the person to whom it should be assigned.