International Journal of Modern Trends in Engineering and Research www.ijmter.com e-ISSN: 2349-9745 p-ISSN: 2393-8161     1 Web Application Testing (Major Challenges and Techniques) Pooja Sharma 1 1 Dept. of CSE,CBS Group of Institutions, Fatehpuri (Jhajjar), India, sharma.pooja218@gmail.com Abstract--Web-based systems represent a young, but rapidly growing technology. As the number of web applications continues to grow, these systems enter a critical role in a multitude of companies. The way web systems impact business aspects, combined with an ever-growing internet user mass, emphasize the importance of developing high-quality products. Thus, proper testing plays a distinctive part in ensuring reliable, robust and high performing operation of web applications. Issues such as the security of the web application, the basic functionality of the site, its accessibility to handicapped users and fully able users, as well as readiness for expected traffic and number of users and the ability to survive a massive spike in user traffic, both of which are related to load testing. The testing of web based applications has much in common with the testing of desktop systems like testing of functionality, configuration, and compatibility. Web application testing consists of the analysis of the web fault compared to the generic software faults. Other faults are strictly dependent on the interaction mode because of web application multi-tier architecture. Some web specific faults are authentication problem, incorrect multi language support, hyperlink problem, cross-browser portability problem, incorrect form construction, incorrect cookie value, incorrect session management, incorrect generation of error page, etc. In this paper, main concern will be to bring up issues regarding testing web application functionality implemented using numerous technologies. Generating a test environment to test this type of application and exercise each of them is a quite tough task. Functional requirement testing of web application will be considered in this paper. So after discussing challenges of web testing, focus of the remainder paper will be on compendious of various existing testing techniques for web application. Finally, there is a brief discussion about future trends of testing scopes in web applications and concluding remarks. Keywords— Web application, Web Testing, testing challenges and techniques. I. INTRODUCTION The Web has had a significant impact on all aspects of our society, from business, education, government, entertainment sectors, industry, to our personal lives. The main advantages of adopting the Web for developing software products include (1) No installation costs, (2) Automatic upgrade with new features for all users, and (3) Universal access from any machine connected to the Internet. On the downside, the use of server and browser technologies make web applications particularly error- prone and challenging to test, causing serious dependability threats. In addition to financial costs, errors in web applications result in loss of revenue and credibility. The difficulty in testing web applications is many-fold. First, web applications are distributed through a client/server architecture, with (asynchronous) HTTP request/response calls to synchronize the application state. Second, they are heterogeneous, i.e., web applications are developed using different programming languages, for instance, HTML, CSS, JavaScript on the client-side and PHP, Ruby, Java on the server-side. And third, web applications have a dynamic nature; in many scenarios they also possess non-deterministic characteristics.