eCommerce Website Testing – Part 5
Previous blogs have covered the need for Software Quality Assurance (SQA) throughout an entire eCommerce development project and the first and second of three SQA process areas that support web system and services development: Daily Support and Iterative Testing. Today will talk about proof tests that are performed at strategic intervals as demonstrations of major functionality.
Proof Tests
Proof tests are commonly considered to be milestones in the development process where progress from one phase of development to the next is predicated on the demonstration of the most recently released feature group.
End-to-End Functionality
While particular integration points are tested during iterative testing, a final end-to-end test is usually performed by QA before production delivery of critical releases. This test verifies that all systems work in coordination to support the full functionality of the website.
Final User Acceptance Testing
While user feedback and acceptance is garnered throughout the development life-cycle, a final user acceptance test is coordinated to verify that the customer accepts the full system before production delivery of critical releases.
Load Testing
Load tests determine at what simultaneous access level website and supporting systems fail to function or performance is significantly degraded. Load testing uses a defined set of web connections and simultaneous web-based virtual user activity. Performance is measured through instrumentation of site functions and server monitoring systems.
First Steps toward Proof Tests
QualityLogic defines and executes a set of end-to-end test paths that exercise all integration points. These tests verify that user inputs are properly recorded and content management retrieves correct markup data and presents it through the site displays.
We verify the documentation that articulates the steps required for defined use and maintenance activities for the system. Each step in the documentation is verified for correctness, and necessary edits/changes are made.
QualityLogic performs load tests of critical site processes by designing test scripts, creating appropriate virtual user accounts and exercising these users through test servers. This is coordinated with the customer’s IT operations to monitor the server systems during the test for excessive resource consumption. We run the tests on an environment with the same hardware and data configuration as production system, often using the production system before it goes live. Tests are coordinated with system and database administrators to assure minimal impact on development and production operations.
Software Quality Assurance Requires Skill and Knowledge
Ecommerce website testing is not for the faint of heart – doing it well requires knowledge, skill, teamwork and discipline.
QualityLogic works with site designers and developers to create effective, efficient test programs that work through the functional and usability aspects of a site development project across all the commonly used browsers. We find and define defects so development engineers can spend the bulk of their time developing features and as little as possible finding and fixing bugs. QualityLogic brings a fresh perspective to our customer’s problems and a powerful array of experienced engineers to generate rapid, innovate solutions to grow and improve web services systems.