Author: Harshit Paul

Front-end testing is the technique of validating the graphical interface of websites or mobile applications to ensure they are free of defects. This testing helps users have a seamless experience using the application and helps them navigate through it quickly.

In general, front-end developers create the graphical user interface (GUI) of a website using different technologies (e.g., HTML, CSS, or JavaScript) so users can interact with it. In essence, the front end is any part of a digital web product that a user can access and interact with.

Reliability testing is a part of the software development process that helps ensure that a software application or system performs seamlessly in each environmental condition as expected over time. It incorporates the test results from functional and non-functional testing to determine issues in software design.

Have you ever thought about the long-term performance of the products or systems daily? Whether it's our smartphones, cars, or even appliances in our homes, we expect them to work correctly and consistently over time.

WebDriver is a simple and concise remote programming interface that can be used to control, or in other words, drive, a browser either locally or on a remote machine. It is a platform-neutral and programming language-neutral wire protocol that can be used to remotely instruct the browser's behavior, like manipulating discovering DOM elements, manipulating DOM elements, controlling the behavior of user agents, etc.

Now part of the Selenium project, the combination of Selenium WebDriver encompasses the language bindings and the implementations of the code that controls individual browsers, which are now often simply referred to as WebDriver. The tool is especially useful in performing browser automation testing across various browsers and operating systems.

Alpha testing is a procedure that helps developers find and address faults in their software products. It is comparable to user acceptance testing, another kind of quality control. The main goal of the Alpha test is to fine-tune a software product by uncovering and fixing faults that were not addressed during the initial phases of development.

While developing new software applications, many organizations overlook conducting Alpha tests. It focuses on particular product areas to detect and correct flaws missed during software development.

Operational testing helps evaluate the operational readiness of a product, service, or application that forms an integral part of quality. You tend to consider the operational aspects that can be a major differentiator in the long run. These aspects are addressed as part of the pre-release before the changes are deployed on the production server.

Organizations around the globe have realized the true value offered by operational tests, which is why you will see more and more structured processes being defined for it. You can have a dedicated team for operational tests, or the QA team can perform it as part of the software development lifecycle.

Test coverage is a black-box testing method that entails testing elements included in the functional requirements specification, software requirements specification, and other required documents. Since the tests are derived from these documents, there is minimal or no chance of automation.

For example, say you want to perform cross-browser testing on your web application to see if it renders properly in different browsers and operating systems. Your test coverage would equal the number of browser + OS combinations for which you have tested your web application's browser compatibility.

The test strategy is an organizational-level document that describes the general test approach, i.e., what needs to be achieved and how to achieve it. This document is outside the scope of the software testing life cycle (STLC) and does not specify testing requirements for a specific project. Instead, it establishes the common testing principles for all of the organization's projects.

When software scales and the team grows, an unchallengeable need for the right test tool and strategy arises. By incorporating an effective test strategy, you can ensure a bug-free application.

If you are living in the same world as I am, you must have heard the latest coding buzzer termed “microservices”—a lifeline for developers and enterprise-scale businesses. Over the last few years, microservice architecture emerged to be on top of conventional SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). This much more precise and smaller architecture brought in many benefits. Enough to make the business more scalable in a fly-by paralleling development, testing, and maintenance across various independent teams. Considering how different this approach is from the conventional monolithic process, the testing strategies that apply are also different. With different testing strategies emerge different testing challenges.

By far, everyone in the tech world is aware that microservice architecture is useful in delivering a more responsive and agile application. Some major organizations, such as Netflix, Nike, Facebook, etc., have backed their performance based on this architecture.

Code coverage is a software quality metric commonly used during the development process that let’s you determine the degree of code that has been tested (or executed). To achieve optimal code coverage, it is essential that the test implementation (or test suites) tests a majority percent of the implemented code.

There are a number of code coverage tools for languages like Java, C#, JavaScript, etc. Using the best-suited code coverage tool is important to understand the percentage of code tested and take appropriate actions to ensure that you achieve the ideal code coverage.

Do you know Cucumber is a great tool used to run acceptance tests using the plain-text functional descriptions with Gherkin? Behavior Driven Development strategy or BDD, as it is popularly known, is implemented using the Cucumber tool.

The best part about using the Cucumber BDD framework are:

One of the most common test automation challenges is how do we modify the request headers in Selenium WebDriver. As an automation tester, you would come across this challenge for any programming language, including Java. Before coming to a solution, we need to understand the problem statement better and arrive at different possibilities to modify the header request in Java while working with Selenium WebDriver Tutorial.

In this Selenium Java tutorial, we will learn how to modify HTTP request headers in Java using Selenium WebDriver with different available options.

While performing UI automation testing on a webpage, we all try to work with the web elements such as buttons, texts, etc. Interaction with the WebElements in the DOM is made possible with the help of Selenium locators. However, there are some aspects of a web page that even the locators can’t manage. Pseudo-elements in CSS fall in that category. Without the correct information, these pseudo-elements can be very hard to automate. In this article, we will see how to handle pseudo-elements in CSS with Selenium WebDriver.

Selenium is a powerful automation testing framework for checking complex web pages but pseudo-elements are tricky to automate. Selenium, when used in conjunction with the JavaScriptExecutor interface, helps to automate pseudo-elements. When testing your website, one must also ensure that the webpage functions as expected across various browser and OS combinations. Given that Selenium test automation is a cross-browser and cross-platform affair, you can perform automation tests at scale with the cloud-based Selenium Grid.

Selenium is a test automation framework extensively used by organizations looking to expedite the web-product testing process. As far as test automation frameworks in Java are concerned, TestNG is largely preferred by QA engineers for the development and enhancement of test suites. With the adoption of Agile methodology in the work environment, a diverse set of stakeholders like QAs, technical managers, and program managers — including non-technical team members — are willing to work collaboratively for the betterment of the product.

The project lifecycle includes the business analysts and other stakeholders testing the application in a thorough manner. This is where the necessity to incorporate Behavior Driven Development (BDD) comes into the picture. Cucumber is a popular BDD tool that is widely used for test automation.