Introduction of Functional Testing

Functional testing is a form of black box testing that bases its test cases on the specifications of the software component under test.

Functional testing typically involves five steps:

1. The identification of functions that the software is expected to perform
2. The creation of input data based on the function’s specifications
3. The determination of output based on the function’s specifications
4. The execution of the test case
5. The comparison of actual and expected outputs

Different Levels of Testing

There are various levels of testing:
• Unit Testing
• Integration Testing
• System Testing

There are various types of testing based upon the intent of testing such as:
• Acceptance Testing
• Performance Testing
• Load Testing
• Regression Testing

Based on the testing Techniques testing can be classified as:
• Black box Testing
• White box Testing

What is Cookies

Cookies:- Cookie is small information stored in text file on user’s hard drive by web server. This information is later used by web browser to retrieve information from that machine. Cookie files are extremely small, comprising no more than 255 characters and 4k of disk space

How it work:- Cookies are nothing but the user’s identity and used to track where the user navigated throughout the web site pages.

Type of cookies:-
1) Session cookies: This cookie is active till the browser that invoked the cookie is open. When we close the browser this session cookie gets deleted. Some time session of say 20 minutes can be set to expire the cookie.

2) Persistent cookies: The cookies that are written permanently on user machine and lasts for months or years.

code :-
that is used to write cookie and can be placed inside any HTML page:
Set-Cookie: NAME=VALUE; expires=DATE; path=PATH; domain=DOMAIN_NAME;

Attributes of cookies:-

Site: WSJ.com Cookie name: WSID
Name: WSID (Name of the cookie)
Content: 1d11c8ec44bf49e0… (Encrypted content)
Domain: .rediff.com
Path: / (Any path after the domain name)
Send For: Any type of connection
Expires: Thursday, December 31, 2020 11:59:59 PM

How to write test cases :-
Some Major Test cases for web application cookie testing:

The first obvious test case is to test if your application is writing cookies properly on disk. You can use the Cookie Tester application also if you don’t have any web application to test but you want to understand the cookie concept for testing.

Test cases:

1) As a Cookie privacy policy make sure from your design documents that no personal or sensitive data is stored in the cookie.

2) If you have no option than saving sensitive data in cookie make sure data stored in cookie is stored in encrypted format.

3) Make sure that there is no overuse of cookies on your site under test. Overuse of cookies will annoy users if browser is prompting for cookies more often and this could result in loss of site traffic and eventually loss of business.

4) Disable the cookies from your browser settings: If you are using cookies on your site, your sites major functionality will not work by disabling the cookies. Then try to access the web site under test. Navigate through the site. See if appropriate messages are displayed to user like “For smooth functioning of this site make sure that cookies are enabled on your browser”. There should not be any page crash due to disabling the cookies. (Please make sure that you close all browsers, delete all previously written cookies before performing this test)

5) Accepts/Reject some cookies: The best way to check web site functionality is, not to accept all cookies. If you are writing 10 cookies in your web application then randomly accept some cookies say accept 5 and reject 5 cookies. For executing this test case you can set browser options to prompt whenever cookie is being written to disk. On this prompt window you can either accept or reject cookie. Try to access major functionality of web site. See if pages are getting crashed or data is getting corrupted.

6) Delete cookie: Allow site to write the cookies and then close all browsers and manually delete all cookies for web site under test. Access the web pages and check the behavior of the pages.

7) Corrupt the cookies: Corrupting cookie is easy. You know where cookies are stored. Manually edit the cookie in notepad and change the parameters to some vague values. Like alter the cookie content, Name of the cookie or expiry date of the cookie and see the site functionality. In some cases corrupted cookies allow to read the data inside it for any other domain. This should not happen in case of your web site cookies. Note that the cookies written by one domain say rediff.com can’t be accessed by other domain say yahoo.com unless and until the cookies are corrupted and someone trying to hack the cookie data.

8 ) Checking the deletion of cookies from your web application page: Some times cookie written by domain say rediff.com may be deleted by same domain but by different page under that domain. This is the general case if you are testing some ‘action tracking’ web portal. Action tracking or purchase tracking pixel is placed on the action web page and when any action or purchase occurs by user the cookie written on disk get deleted to avoid multiple action logging from same cookie. Check if reaching to your action or purchase page deletes the cookie properly and no more invalid actions or purchase get logged from same user.

9) Cookie Testing on Multiple browsers: This is the important case to check if your web application page is writing the cookies properly on different browsers as intended and site works properly using these cookies. You can test your web application on Major used browsers like Internet explorer (Various versions), Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera etc.

10) If your web application is using cookies to maintain the logging state of any user then log in to your web application using some username and password. In many cases you can see the logged in user ID parameter directly in browser address bar. Change this parameter to different value say if previous user ID is 100 then make it 101 and press enter. The proper access message should be displayed to user and user should not be able to see other users account.

What is Views

A view is a tailored presentation of the data contained in one or more tables or other views. A view takes the output of a query and treats it as a table. Therefore, a view can be thought of as a stored query or a virtual table. You can use views in most places where a table can be used.
For example, the employees table has several columns and numerous rows of information. If you want users to see only five of these columns or only specific rows, then you can create a view of that table for other users to access.

View shows only few selected columns from base table.

Why Views Are Used

Views provide a means to present a different representation of the data that resides within the base tables. Views are very powerful because they let you tailor the presentation of data to different types of users. Views are often used to:

Provide an additional level of table security by restricting access to a
predetermined set of rows or columns of a table For example, Figure 5–5 shows how the STAFF view does not show the salary or commission_pct columns of the base table employees.

Hide data complexity
For example, a single view can be defined with a join, which is a collection of related columns or rows in multiple tables. However, the view hides the fact that this information actually originates from several tables.

Simplify statements for the user
For example, views allow users to select information from multiple tables without actually knowing how to perform a join.

Present the data in a different perspective from that of the base table
For example, the columns of a view can be renamed without affecting the tables
on which the view is based.

Isolate applications from changes in definitions of base tables
For example, if a view’s defining query references three columns of a four column table, and a fifth column is added to the table, then the view’s definition is not affected, and all applications using the view are not affected.

Express a query that cannot be expressed without using a view
For example, a view can be defined that joins a GROUP BY view with a table, or a view can be defined that joins a UNION view with a table.

Save complex queries
For example, a query can perform extensive calculations with table information. By saving this query as a view, you can perform the calculations each time the view is queried.