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Testing Products for Web Applications?

Posted by Cliff on from the making-sure-it-all-works-as-it-should dept.

hellbunnie asks: "I work with a team of developers many of whom spend much of their time writing web-based front-ends for DBs or other applications. Now, while we enjoy programming, we're pretty lazy when it comes to testing. Even if we weren't so lazy, I think we'd still miss a number of problems, 'cos there's just so many different screens that use any particular method/function that you might change. That means there's a lot to be tested after each change. So, my question is has anyone any experience with automated systems for testing web applications?"

"I've seen a lot of automated test suites advertised and I've always assumed that they were no substitute for careful testing by a human. However, as the number of web pages that we need to maintain grows, I've begun to wish that we had something that we could kick off at night, that would follow all links on our system and fill in values for the various forms it encountered, then when we arrived in the next morning there'd be some sort of report available detailing its findings. It could flag any pages that returned something obviously incorrect, such as a SQL error, a blank page or just the word 'error'.

Does such a thing exist or am I just engaging in wishful thinking to imagine that there might be something flexible enough to do the job? What do other people do to test their software?"

4 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. you forgot the link by McCart42 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Well you hit upon one good way, you just forgot to post the link...of course if you did you'd be more worried about your server overloading than your web frontends not working correctly...

    --
    "I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
  2. Re:My god by Loligo · · Score: 3, Funny

    >Weve just had 9/11/02, and bush is attacking
    >Iraq, and your talking about TESTING PRODUCTS
    >FOR WEB APPLICATIONS? MY GOD PEOPLE GET SOME
    >PRIORTIES!!!!

    If the web is full of buggy applications, the terrorists have already won.

    (my talking about testing products? what?)

  3. You have it right here by Christianfreak · · Score: 3, Funny

    Just post the link to your website on /., if it doesn't crash from the load then it's probably pretty good. Hey maybe Taco should look into this! He could start offering it as a service :)

    --
    The Anti-Blog
  4. Re:There's a better solution than Mercury!!!!! by caferace · · Score: 3, Funny
    To quote your system requirements:

    "The XMSGuardian(TM) Console requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher running on Windows 95/98/NT, 2000 or XP.....

    Pricing and Availability:
    XMSGuardian(TM) is now available as a monthly subscription. Pricing begins at $1,995 per month for a single URL...."

    And not a downloadable demo in sight. Buh-bye.