Top 12 Challenges of Web Application Testing - The Digital Marketing Way
Himani Kankaria
Growth Strategies for GTM and Scale-ups | SaaS (early to unicorns), IT, B2B, eCommerce, D2C | Speaker
Why do you hire a digital marketing specialist or an agency?
1. To generate web traffic
2. To improve search engine rankings
3. To increase the no. of leads
All of the above are the most common business targets out of any digital marketing strategies to be followed. But, what we, as a digital marketing strategist has to take care of, to achieve your target?
To Make Your Web Application Up-to-Date
And, to achieve this, we need to perform initial web application testing which includes the complete web application audit to identify any error that might divert a customer from the website.
Many a times, I have come with these kind of questions. But, most of our time is utilized to understand why the web application is unable to generate leads.
I would suggest all the Enterprises out there to immediately focus on your web application testing and QA part.
Why do you need to perform Web Application Testing?
Let’s have a look at what challenges your web app can face, if testing is not taken care of.
Types of Major Challenges in Web Application Testing
1. Integration
How would you rate any application?
You would love to have the application’s functionalities, reliability and performance to be working amazingly and those things make the application rocking. I bet.
We cannot compromise on any of the above three aspects of the web application. So, it requires integration testing as its result would define the overall applications’ performance at the user’s end.
I am sure, no businesses can afford losing even a single customer.
2. Interoperability
Wow! I need to elaborate this.
While developing any application, we don’t know which device, operating system & browsers our customers will be using while browsing our web application. We call it responsive web application development.
But, in software testing industry, they need to be tested for various functionalities to work on any environment, device and browser.
Responsive web application is in #Trend these days!
3. Security
We all are aware of the cyber threats that can take place at any moment. Regular security testing is required to check for any cyber threat. Also, data integrity tests need to be performed if there are any chances of data loss. Testers take due time to perform security tests as they carefully deal with the unsecured data transfer.
How about the risks based on Intranet-based applications and Internet-based applications?
Intranet-based applications are bound to pre-defined usage of software and hardware required and they can be tested easily. But, when it comes to Internet-based applications, security measures are defined much more clearly by the skilled testers and QA team.
4. Performance
Application’s Page/Loading Speed matters a lot. And seriously, we make sure our customer’s application loads much faster as delay in a single second can divert the user and we don’t want that, period.
Hardware testing, misunderstanding the required application’s features can surely lead to a breach of application performance. Integration and interoperability testing directly influence performance testing.
5. Usability
We all love scalable and interactive web applications. Whether into Windows-based or Mac-based devices, the testers definitely perform the usability testing of the web applications on the real browsers of the real devices.
An important one, right?
6. Incoming & Outgoing of the apps
Shopaholics can enter into an e-commerce website via signing in or directly on a product page. Also, in an online ticket booking application, a user may directly choose a movie/event to buy a ticket or maybe, he/she directly lands on the payment page via 3rd party websites.
When your application has various entry and exit points, the application testers take deep care to test those points well.
7. Cross Browser
Web applications need to be tested on various browsers to ensure the website works perfectly fine in each and every browser. Here, various browser testing tools can help.
In fact, an application needs to be considered to perform browser testing as similar browsers can be used in various devices with varying screen resolution and software and hardware specifications.
8. Lower Internet Speed/Bandwidth
Low Internet speed is hated by you, me and everyone. So, we want applications to work on those devices as well where people don’t have high Internet Bandwidth.
While considering testing Internet-based applications, with low Internet speed, we can imagine that various web components can take more time to load and that can affect other components as well. So, this is quite important to test.
9. Regulatory Compliance and Standards Based
We also need to check whether the web application is developed based on the regulatory Compliance and according to the standards specified globally.
10. Firewalls
The web applications need to be tested across various firewalls. There are chances that certain ports might have been blocked and still the web application is expected to behave well. These scenarios need to be tested as well.
11. Web Services Requests
Are you going to integrate Google Maps API in your contact us page of your website? Then you need to take care of the web services as well.
All our latest web applications now consist of layer of web services like XML/SOAP, JSON/REST. The parameter values of the requests made by the web services need to be considered to test. Earlier it was a headache, but thanks to these web services testing tools.
12. Limited Project Delivery Time
Project delivery time is a crucial factor while deciding a web application development vendor. So, when the time is limited to develop a web application, testing is not done appropriately. So, when my client comes with an application with so many errors, I ask them in how much time the application has been developed and when the time becomes limited, quality is bound to suffer.
When the time becomes limited, quality is bound to suffer
Conclusion
Now you are through with all the above web application challenges. I am sure, you won’t take a chance to miss even one customer. So, make sure you involve testing services and QA team to have your web app a rock-solid one.
Also, recently many web testing tools are available, both manual and automated. But here is why I highly trust automated testing tools. Check out those tools with your dedicated testing team.
What challenges have you faced in any of the web applications you've come across? Let’s talk about them and share.