On the Question of Automated Website Testing

Almost all webmasters (or at least “quite a lot of webmasters”) have heard about the significance of website testing before the production. Having developed a website or a web application, most authors want to publish it immediately and see how people like it. If they ignore prior website testing, the project may appear unprepared for real Internet activity and reveal awful performance. The lack of proper testing (due to laziness or inexperience of the webmaster) leads to bad user impression, what is deadly for the whole project.

Website testing is of supreme importance. It makes you sure that every visitor (including those with 28.8kbps modem connection – their number is still big enough to be neglected) will see something on the screen within the first 10-15 seconds. In other case, they will most likely close the window before the site loads. This is a common problem for all new projects: even if the website showed good performance at the stage of development, it can appear almost unusable under real Internet loads. Website testing is needed to find and optimize weak places, or otherwise a crowd of concurrent visitors can slow the site down to full unusability.

The good news is that today there are website testing services and utilities that allow testing website behavior in different conditions. Some of them (such as web-version of the “tracert” Windows service) provide online test of availability and load time of the website from different places around the world. And some of them (for instance, Testing Master by Novosoft) can perform thorough website testing that reveals all weak places of the website and shows where you should tune it. Using such utilities is much less expensive than hiring a team of testers, and the results they give are far more accurate as against manual website testing.

The concept of most website testing utilities is very much the same. A program creates multiple virtual users that produce huge loads on server applications. Each virtual user emulates a real visitor who works under a certain browser, operating system and within some testing scenario. Website testing scenarios must describe all user actions that can be performed on the site: reading of different descriptions, using onsite search, submitting orders, updating the pages, etc. They must also take into account all user mistakes that can occur: missing credit card info, bad email address, etc. This is essential for correct website testing results, since each new action makes server applications generate a new page and affects the overall website performance.

Some advanced website testing utilities, for example the aforesaid Testing Master, allow basing test scenarios on your actual behavior. Testing Master has an integrated recorder that memorizes all actions as you browse the website in Internet Explorer and provides a quick way to define your website testing scenario. During the operation, it gathers statistics on load time and speed and in the end returns explicit information on what can be improved. Like other utilities of the same class, it allows performing a so-called stress load website testing, which shows breaking points and bottlenecks of the site. This kind of website testing gives an opportunity to predict the future performance, when the website will gain popularity and acknowledgement.

Website testing utilities vary in feature sets and user interfaces. Some of them can give only final reports, showing statistical information for each page, each virtual user, sizes of uploaded and downloaded data, etc. Other programs provide real-time reports and graphs, what enables the user to stop the test if the problem is identified quickly. In any case, they are helpful for web developers of all levels, allowing them to improve performance of the website and prepare it for high traffic strain. Do remember: this is all about user impression. The better your site works, the more positive image it leaves – and the faster it will grow to an authoritative, trustworthy and profit-making resource.

About The Author

Tatyana Birder
For more information visit these websites website testing, Testing Master by Novosoft LLC