Ensuring WebSite quality: a case study

Every enterprise faces serious challenges in testing their WebSites, and these challenges are growing bigger as the number of users are depending more on the web for all types of e-commerce activity. Web technology has matured rapidly over the last few years. Previous web benchmarking focused merely on the number of "hits" that a web site could handle within any given time period. Businesses looking to capitalize on Internet technology require benchmarks that provide statistics based upon realistic end-user experiences. Statistics of importance include: average wait time for a dynamically generated HTML page to be delivered to an end user under heavy server loads; scalability of a provided web application solution when additional servers are incorporated into an existing server cluster; and maintenance support if a catastrophic server failure occurs. Based on our experience in developing web based projects, we discuss in this paper the steps for testing the WebSite and the factors that determine what to test in a WebSite to ensure quality.