There are various phases in software development life cycle (SDLC). On of the significant phases among this is software testing. Different types of testing are employed in each phase beginning with development till it reaches the market. The testing spans over all the stages in the SDLC. Moreover there are different varieties of the software that needs to be tested before it is released to the customer.

Software for web applications is one type of software. With the advancements in Internet and its high impact on our day to day life, web software has achieved high importance in software industry and our daily lives. The majority of the security threats start off from Internet and it is necessary to make sure that the web software is carefully tested prior to releasing to the costumer.

Even though the testing of web software is vital, there is at all times rush in building and testing those application due to time constraints. There are different methods that the test engineers use to test this software. They are code testing, load testing, compatibility testing, functional testing and regression testing.

The standard pattern for the release of web software consists of two main stages, alpha and beta testing. The first stage or alpha testing takes place at the developers' site where either potential users/customers or a purposely created independent test team will interact with a simulated or actual operational version of the software being tested. Because during alpha testing the software is actually still being developed only small modules of the software are tested during this stage. When of-the-self software is employed, alpha testing is often used as an internal acceptance test. After being alpha tested software will only be released when all the main functional sections have been both coded and tested.

After the alpha testing stage is finished, the software advances to the beta phase of testing. The web software should be fully completed by now. The software is released to a restricted number of users for testing before it is officially released. Since the web site design uses HTML coding, it's easy to integrate individual web pages on site; hence the alpha/beta method is usually not used for website development. This means they can build and test one page at a time. After completion they can move onto the next one, with each page independent of each other.

When software testers or development engineers are code testing they are checking for the presence of software bugs. Web development is a very rapid process so the absence of bugs is required. Paired-programming is one of the favorite methods that highly qualified testers can use to produce bug free coding.

The Paired programming is a method in software development where two programmers work simultaneously at one keyboard. One programmer types in the code when the other person observes and reviews each line at the same time. The judgment behind taking up this method is the following. The Economist proclaims that, "Laurie Williams of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City has shown that paired programmers are only 15% slower than two independent individual programmers, but produce 15% fewer bugs."

The testing process continues through out the software development cycle so that at the time of final release it is free of bugs. Load testing is done to see at what point the application fails or the performance reduces when under heavy loads such as multiple users on or heavy server traffic. This type of testing will help to arrive at statistics such as how many users the site will sustain at the same time, the quantity of communication it will hold and the reaction time under various circumstances.

Compatibility testing evaluates the application's compatibility with the computing environment like the operating system, database, browser compatibility, backwards compatibility, computing capacity of the hardware platform and compatibility of the peripherals.

The testing used to validate the conformance to specifications and requirements is the Functional testing. This testing involves performing a sequence of tests to validate the behavior of the software, feature by feature using a large number of normal and abnormal data. The Regression testing the type of testing done to make sure that improvement, defect corrections or any additional changes to the software has not broken down any existing functionality.

When iterative methodology is used to develop software regression testing is crucial. In iterative programming, new modules are added to the core module to increase the functionality provided by the application, this needs to be done with the certainty that the added module does not affect the original functionality of the running module. The aim of regression testing is to discover regression bugs. All the types of test mentioned above are necessary to provide complete web software testing.