Welcome to Web Testing

Why Read This Chapter?
The goal of this book is to help you effectively plan for and conduct the testing of Web-based applications. This book will be more helpful to you if you understand the philosophy behind its design.
Software testing practices have been improving steadily over the past few decades. Yet, as testers, we still face many of the same challenges that we have faced for years. We are challenged by rapidly evolving technologies and the need to improve testing techniques. We are also challenged by the lack of research on how to test for and analyze software errors from their behavior, as opposed to at the source code level. Finally, we are challenged by the lack of technical information and training programs geared toward serving the growing population of the not-yet-well-defined software testing profession. Yet, in today's world on Internet time, resources and testing time are in short supply. The quicker we can get the information that we need, the more productive and more successful we will be at doing our job. The goal of this book is to help you do your job effectively.

This chapter offers a historical perspective on the changing objectives of software testing. It touches on the gray-box testing approach and suggests the importance of having a balance of product design, both from the designer's and the user's perspective, and system-specific technical knowledge. It also explores the value of problem analysis to determine what to test, when to test, and where to test. Finally, this chapter will discuss what assumptions this book has about the reader.