Testing web applications

Question

My question so general, but I think the answer will be specific.

All I want to know is:

Is there a way or steps or mechanism to test the application (web application) in a professional way?

Many times when I finish developing and try my application, testing it with dummy data several times, and when I think every thing is okay and I think I have covered all possible scenarios, I find I forgot important issues, or others tell me they found problems in my application.

How do I overcome this problem, and save my time?

Answer 1

Visual studio have a great test software

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182409.aspx

http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/briankel/Visual-Studio-Test-Professional-2010-The-Tool-for-the-Modern-Tester

Answer 2

This is a very big subject, there are hundreds of books written about software testing. The Wikipedia article should get you started on some concepts, but you really need to learn a lot more.

This SO question should be useful in choosing a book to start with.

Answer 3

Selenium is a great suite of tools to help test web applications. I'd recommend having a look at that.

Answer 4

I use http://xunit.codeplex.com in combination with http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/.

Answer 5

Use either ms test framework or NUnit.

I recommend reading about unit tests and focused integration tests.

For full system tests use WatiN.

Answer 6

As a proffesional tester my suggestion is that you should have a healthy mix of automated and manual testing.

AUTOMATED TESTING

• Unit Testing
  Use NUnit to test your classes, functions and interaction between them.
  http://www.nunit.org/index.php

• Automated Functional Testing
  If it's possible you should automate a lot of the functional testing. Some frame works have functional testing built into them. Otherwise you have to use a tool for it. If you are developing web sites/applications you might want to look at Selenium.
  http://www.peterkrantz.com/2005/selenium-for-aspnet/

• Continuous Integration
  Use CI to make sure all your automated tests run every time someone in your team makes a commit to the project.
  http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html

MANUAL TESTING
As much as I love automated testing it is, IMHO, not a substitute for manual testing. The main reason being that an automated can only do what it is told and only verify what it has been informed to view as pass/fail. A human can use it's intelligence to find faults and raise questions that appear while testing something else.

• Exploratory Testing
  ET is a very low cost and effective way to find defects in a project. It take advantage of the intelligence of a human being and a teaches the testers/developers more about the project than any other testing technique i know of. Doing an ET session aimed at every feature deployed in the test environment is not only an effective way to find problems fast, but also a good way to learn and fun!
  http://www.satisfice.com/articles/et-article.pdf

Answer 7

A lot more than a few nice tools goes into "professionally" testing any application.

But sticking with tools for the moment, a good tools for testing .Net sites is WatiN. And a good example of using WatiN in a real world situation is the DotNetNuke Automation Tests project. It is the continually growing set of automated tests that DotNetNuke Corp. is using to test DotNetNuke on a daily basis, and best of all it's open source.