The software development life cycle (SDLC) is composed of various stages. Software performance testing is an important stage within the software development cycle (SDCL). Different types of testing are employed in each phase beginning with development till it reaches the market. These methods are employed during various stages of the SDLC. The software itself also comes in different varieties, which all require testing before they’re released on the market.

Software for web applications is one type of software. With the advancements in Internet and its high impact on our day to day life, web software has achieved high importance in software industry and our daily lives. The majority of the security threats start off from Internet and it is necessary to make sure that the web software is carefully tested prior to releasing to the costumer.

Even though the testing of web software is vital, there is at all times rush in building and testing those application due to time constraints. The different types of tests can be grouped in code testing, load testing, compatibility testing, functional testing and regression testing.

The web software is usually released by means of a model of software release known as alpha/beta testing.Alpha testing is a replicated or real ready testing by would-be users/customers or a separate testing team on the developers’ location. This testing will be upon incomplete software and will be tested for small parts of the software. Alpha testing is frequently employed for off-the-shelf software as a method of internal acceptance testing. After being alpha tested software will only be released when all the main functional sections have been both coded and tested.

After the alpha testing is completed the software is permitted to undergo the beta phase of testing. In beta testing the web software I completely built. The software is made available for use to a restricted number of customers intended for software testing previous to the official release. In case of website design it is easy to put together the various pages as the website design uses HTML. So the alpha/beta technique is generally not used for website development. This imply that it is possible to build and test one page at a time and later go to the next one with independent testing for each one.

In code testing the software testing or development engineer examines the codes for software bugs. It’s essential for the software to be free of bugs because the web development process is very quick. Paired-programming is one of the popular methods used by highly qualified technicians to achieve error free coding .

The Paired programming is a method in software development where two programmers work simultaneously at one keyboard. One programmer types in the code when the other person observes and reviews each line at the same time. Support for this methodology is provided by some research data produced by Laurie Williams at University of Utah in Salt Lake City. According to this research paired programmers produce code with 15% less bugs while only being 15% slower than individual programmers.

The fact that the software is tested many times during the development process should provide a bug free software by the end of it. Load testing is performed against heavy loads or inputs such as multiple user log-ins and mail servers to determine the point at which the web-site/application fails or the point when performance degrades. The testing documents the number of users the site will support simultaneously, the number of transactions it can handle and its response time under various conditions or traffic flows.

Compatibility testing evaluates the application’s compatibility with the computing environment like the operating system, database, browser compatibility, backwards compatibility, computing capacity of the hardware platform and compatibility of the peripherals.

Functional testing asses the alignment between the application and its specifications checking that it provides all the required functions. To do that an extense range of both normal and erronous data will be imput to validate the behaviour caused by each of the software features Regression testing is carried out to check that any changes made to the code in order to enhance it or to fix defects has not affected any functionality.

Regression testing is very important whenever there’s iterative development of software. In iterative programming, new modules are added to the core module to increase the functionality provided by the application, this needs to be done with the certainty that the added module does not affect the original functionality of the running module. Regression testing is performed for the purpose of discovering regression bugs. The above tests are essential for completing web software testing.