There are six types of
website testing, and in this notes, I will be focusing first on Functional
Testing.
So what is Functionality
Testing?
Basically, this is when
QA checks if the website functions correctly according to the set list of
requirements. Let’s list down the things you need to check when doing
Functionality Testing:
- Links - check the following if these are behaving accordingly and that there are no dead links.
- Internal links. This includes
your navigation, other links that will point the user to other pages
inside your website. You can find these at the header, sidebars, footer
and in the content in some pages.
- Mailto: links or the links
which when clicked will open the email client with preset recipient and
allows the users to compose their email.
- Links that are pointed other
websites which most of the times will open new tabs.
- Forms our users use to submit information to our site. The following should be checked:
- How the inputs are being
validated.
- The default values of each
input field
- How the fields behave to
invalid input
- Any options to modify the
forms
- Cookies where the user data is temporarily stored in the user’s computer. It contains login sessions and other user activity-related data.
- Check how the site behaves
with enabled and disabled cookies in your browser options
- Check if the cookies are
encrypted
- Check for login sessions after
the cookie expired
- Try to delete the cookie
manually then check how the website will behave
- Validate HTML/CSS
- Check for any HTML syntax
error. There are online tools which can help like
https://validator.w3.org/
- Check if your site can be
indexed by Search Engines
- You can also verify if you have accurate site map in XML and HTML format
- Data Integrity - do database related activities to check for consistency of the data retrieved from and sent to the database. Check if there are any errors in displaying the data.
There are tools you can
use to do Functionality testing. Below are some of the suggestions:
- Selenium
- for open source enthusiasts. This functionality testing tool is well
known with many active users/ organizations
- Telerik
Test Studio
- CUITE
- a tool by Microsoft which is now moved to Github
More tools are listed and with good description in this
article by softwaretestinghelp: http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/tools/top-30-functional-testing-tools/