COOKIE TESTING

The WWW is built on a very simple, but powerful premise. All material on the Web is formatted in a general, uniform format called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), and all information requests and responses conform to a similarly standard protocol. When someone accesses a server on the Web, such as the Library of Congress, the user's Web browser will send an information request to the Library of Congress' computer. This computer is called a Web server. The Web server will respond to the request by transmitting the desired information to the user's computer. There, the user's browser will display the received information on the user's screen.Cookies are pieces of information generated by a Web server and stored in the user's computer, ready for future access. Cookies are embedded in the HTML information flowing back and forth between the user's computer and the servers. Cookies were implemented to allow user-side customization of Web information. For example, cookies are used to personalize Web search engines, to allow users to participate in WWW-wide contests (but only once!), and to store shopping lists of items a user has selected while browsing through a virtual shopping mall.Essentially, cookies make use of user-specific information transmitted by the Web server onto the user's computer so that the information might be available for later access by itself or other servers. In most cases, not only does the storage of personal information into a cookie go unnoticed, so does access to it. Web servers automatically gain access to relevant cookies whenever the user establishes a connection to them, usually in the form of Web requests.Cookies are based on a two-stage process. First the cookie is stored in the user's computer without their consent or knowledge. For example, with customizable Web search engines like My Yahoo!, a user selects categories of interest from the Web page. The Web server then creates a specific cookie, which is essentially a tagged string of text containing the user's preferences, and it transmits this cookie to the user's computer. The user's Web browser, if cookie-savvy, receives the cookie and stores it in a special file called a cookie list. This happens without any notification or user consent. As a result, personal information (in this case the user's category preferences) is formatted by the Web server, transmitted, and saved by the user's computer.During the second stage, the cookie is clandestinely and automatically transferred from the user's machine to a Web server. Whenever a user directs her Web browser to display a certain Web page from the server, the browser will, without the user's knowledge, transmit the cookie containing personal information to the Web server.

It would be easy for you to understand the test cases for testing cookies when you have clear understanding of how cookies work? How cookies stored on hard drive? And how can we edit cookie settings?

What is Cookie?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. Generally cookie contains personalized user data or information that is used to communicate between different web pages.

Why Cookies are used?Cookies are nothing but the user’s identity and used to track where the user navigated throughout the web site pages. The communication between web browser and web server is stateless.

For example if you are accessing domain http://www.example.com/1.html then web browser will simply query to example.com web server for the page 1.html. Next time if you type page as http://www.example.com/2.html then new request is send to example.com web server for sending 2.html page and web server don’t know anything about to whom the previous page 1.html served.

What if you want the previous history of this user communication with the web server? You need to maintain the user state and interaction between web browser and web server somewhere. This is where cookie comes into picture. Cookies serve the purpose of maintaining the user interactions with web server.

How cookies work?The HTTP protocol used to exchange information files on the web is used to maintain the cookies. There are two types of HTTP protocol. Stateless HTTP and Stateful HTTP protocol. Stateless HTTP protocol does not keep any record of previously accessed web page history. While Stateful HTTP protocol do keep some history of previous web browser and web server interactions and this protocol is used by cookies to maintain the user interactions.
Whenever user visits the site or page that is using cookie, small code inside that HTML page (Generally a call to some language script to write the cookie like cookies in JAVAScript, PHP, Perl) writes a text file on users machine called cookie.Here is one example of the 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;
When user visits the same page or domain later time this cookie is read from disk and used to identify the second visit of the same user on that domain. Expiration time is set while writing the cookie. This time is decided by the application that is going to use the cookie.

Generally two types of cookies are written on user machine.

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.

Where cookies are stored?When any web page application writes cookie it get saved in a text file on user hard disk drive. The path where the cookies get stored depends on the browser. Different browsers store cookie in different paths. E.g. Internet explorer store cookies on path “C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Cookies”Here the “Default User” can be replaced by the current user you logged in as. Like “Administrator”, or user name like “Vijay” etc.The cookie path can be easily found by navigating through the browser options. In Mozilla Firefox browser you can even see the cookies in browser options itself. Open the Mozila browser, click on Tools->Options->Privacy and then “Show cookies” button.

How cookies are stored?Lets take example of cookie written by rediff.com on Mozilla Firefox browser:On Mozilla Firefox browser when you open the page rediff.com or login to your rediffmail account, a cookie will get written on your Hard disk. To view this cookie simply click on “Show cookies” button mentioned on above path. Click on Rediff.com site under this cookie list. You can see different cookies written by rediff domain with different names.
Site: Rediff.com Cookie name: RMIDName: RMID (Name of the cookie)Content: 1d11c8ec44bf49e0… (Encrypted content)Domain: .rediff.comPath: / (Any path after the domain name)Send For: Any type of connectionExpires: Thursday, December 31, 2020 11:59:59 PM

Applications where cookies can be used:

1) To implement shopping cart:Cookies are used for maintaining online ordering system. Cookies remember what user wants to buy. What if user adds some products in their shopping cart and if due to some reason user don’t want to buy those products this time and closes the browser window? When next time same user visits the purchase page he can see all the products he added in shopping cart in his last visit.

2) Personalized sites:When user visits certain pages they are asked which pages they don’t want to visit or display. User options are get stored in cookie and till the user is online, those pages are not shown to him.

3) User tracking: To track number of unique visitors online at particular time.

4) Marketing:Some companies use cookies to display advertisements on user machines. Cookies control these advertisements. When and which advertisement should be shown? What is the interest of the user? Which keywords he searches on the site? All these things can be maintained using cookies.

5) User sessions:Cookies can track user sessions to particular domain using user ID and password.

Drawbacks of cookies:

1) Even writing Cookie is a great way to maintain user interaction, if user has set browser options to warn before writing any cookie or disabled the cookies completely then site containing cookie will be completely disabled and can not perform any operation resulting in loss of site traffic.

2) Too many Cookies:If you are writing too many cookies on every page navigation and if user has turned on option to warn before writing cookie, this could turn away user from your site.

3) Security issues:Some times users personal information is stored in cookies and if someone hack the cookie then hacker can get access to your personal information. Even corrupted cookies can be read by different domains and lead to security issues.

4) Sensitive information:Some sites may write and store your sensitive information in cookies, which should not be allowed due to privacy concerns.

This should be enough to know what cookies are.

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. 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.

These are some Major test cases to be considered while testing website cookies. You can write multiple test cases from these test cases by performing various combinations. If you have some different application scenario, you can mention your test cases in comments below.

CAREER AS SOFTWARE TESTER

In recent days this is the most asked question to me by readers. How to get software testing job? How to come in software testing field? or Can I get job in testing?
All these questions are similar and I want to give also similar answer for this. I have written post on choosing software testing as your career where you can analyze your abilities and know which are the most important skills required for software testing.

I will continue mentioning that “know your interest before going into any career field”. Just going to software testing career or any other hot career is wrong and which may result into loss of your job interest as well as your job.

Now you know your abilities, skills, interests right? and you have made decision to go for software testing career as it is your favorite career and you suit most in this career. So here is a guideline for how to get a good job in software testing field.

If you are a fresher and just passed out from your college or passing out in coming months then you need to prepare well for some software testing methodologies. Prepare all the manual testing concepts. If possible have some hands-on on some automation and bug tracking tools like winrunner and test director. It is always a good idea to join any software testing institute or class which will provide you a good start and direction of preparation. You can join any 4 months duration software testing course or can do diploma in software testing which is typically of 6 months to 1 year. Keep the preparation going on in your course duration. This will help you to start giving interviews right after getting over your course.

If you have some sort of previous IT experience and want to switch to software testing then it’s somewhat simple for you. Show your previous IT experience in your resume while applying for software testing jobs. If possible do some crash course to get idea of software testing concepts like I mentioned for freshers above. Keep in mind that you have some kind of IT experience so be prepared for some tough interview questions here.

As companies always prefer some kind of relevant experience for any software job, its better if you have relevant experience in software testing and QA. It may be any kind of software testing tools hands-on or some testing course from reputed institutes.

Please always keep in mind- Do not add fake experience of any kind. This can ruin your career forever. Wait and try for some more days to get the job by your abilities instead of getting into trap of fake experience.

Last important words, Software testing is not ‘anyone can do career!’ Remove this attitude from your mind if someone has told such kind of foolish thing to you. Testing requires in depth knowledge of SDLF, out of box thinking, analytical skill and some programming language skill apart from software testing basics.

So best luck and start preparation for your rocking career! I will continue writing this career series and what you actually need to prepare for software testing interview.

UGLY BABY SYNDROME !

Ugly babies.

While I’m not a huge fan of American Idol, I’m a big fan of Simon Cowell! Do you think if one of the Idol winners ever gets an award, like a Grammy, they will thank Simon? I doubt it. He’s lucky. He can be open and say what he feels. Sure people are angry at him. But you know what? He’s usually right. It’s just the message delivery that upsets most people. Deep down, they know. Unfortunately, for software testers, that’s not a luxury we have.

I think Simon would be a great software tester. A desirable attribute for any good software tester is to tell people what we think - tactfully. Software developers, Project Managers, Product Managers, and anyone else on a software project, spend countless hours designing and developing software applications for customers. They’re proud parents. It’s their baby. Then they show it to us, and essentially ask: “What do you think?” More often than not we have to tell them they have an ugly baby!

I imagine, if you have an ugly baby, Simon would tell you so!
Nobody wants to tell someone they have an ugly baby, but unfortunately, it’s our job. The key is how you tell them. Sadly, you will always run into a proud parent that will be hurt no matter how you tell them. Different parents will respond differently depending on the way the message is delivered or received.
So how do we handle these delicate situations? Having been a test consultant now for a few years, I’ve had to deal with a number of delicate parents. Here are a few tips on the proper care and feeding of delicate parents:
· Build a Rapport with the Team: Get to know them. Take them to lunch. Buy them bagels or donuts. Let them know that you are there to make them look good. When a virtually flawless application is delivered to a customer, no one says how well tested it was. Development teams will always get the credit. However, if it is delivered with bugs, everyone will wonder who tested it!

· Be Honest and Responsive: One of the best compliments I ever received was: “If Dave and I grew up together, I’d never let him touch my toys. He breaks everything!” Tell them up front, you’re going to do everything in your power to break their application. It’s what you do! Although a good magician never reveals their secrets, a good tester should. If I have time, I will usually tell them what my attack plan will be.

· Be Open and Available. Want me to take a look at your requirements? – Absolutely! I always let teams know, that if I’m available before formal testing begins, I will give them a free look at their requirements, specifications, code, whatever they have. I won’t create a defect in the bug tracker. I’ll just shoot them a quick email, and make a note to look at it later. It ends up saving everyone time in the long run and, once again, makes them look good when formal testing begins. It also helps me develop and refine my tests.
· Let Them Review Your Tests. If you’re going to look at and critique their stuff, it’s only fair to let them do the same to your stuff.

· Don’t Rely on the Bug Tracker. Never send a public ugly baby notice! The last thing you want to do is rely on the bug tracker to deliver bad news. There is nothing worse, or less productive, than flame wars in the bug tracker. Talk to someone! Let them know what you did and why you did it. Show them. Lead them towards a solution. Tell them what your expectations are. It may be a simple misunderstanding of a vague requirement. Count to 10, then write it up.

· Check Your Attitude. This is my personal weakness. You don’t want to come off badly. What’s funny to you, or well meaning, can be completely misconstrued. Be critical, but constructive. You need an air of friendliness and support. If you come off as arrogant or condescending, the ultimate message will be lost.
· Don’t Take it Personally. Tough to do? Absolutely! But you’re just the messenger. Its’ usually not about you. You’re just the closest and easiest target. Grow a thick skin.

· Be Prepared. It’s going to happen. Maybe it hasn’t happened yet, but if you do this long enough, it will. Be ready for it.

· Write an Article. While it may not solve anything, you will feel better afterwards. I know I do!

Unfortunately, while these tips tend to work well with in-house teams, it can be difficult with geographically distributed teams. Since they don’t work with you face-to-face every day, and you can’t take them to lunch or buy them donuts or bagels, there is a tendency for the message to get distorted. As I recently learned (the hard way). Even though you may have good intentions, someone’s feelings may get hurt. Unfortunately, attitudes don’t translate well over the phone or by email. Don’t be afraid to apologize. It’s typically a misunderstanding. It’s more important to heal the relationship and move on than to stand on principle. If you’re right – gloat to yourself.

Bottom line – no matter what you do, you’re going to hurt someone’s feelings. Be prepared for it and don’t be afraid to make adjustments if you need to. It may still be an ugly baby, but it’s never too late to do something about it! Someone has to do it. You don’t want the customer to do it.

If you’re in this business for personal rewards or recognition, you probably need to rethink your career choice. Not that they’re not there. They’re just few and far between. No, a good tester gains satisfaction by knowing, albeit silently, that they were the reason the application was virtually flawless. Sure, no one else may notice, but I know, and that’s good enough for me!