Guide to Browser Compatibility Testing

Recently, I had to learn how to effectively test a web-based application across multiple popular browsers. Then I started to read various websites/blogs of Leaders in Software Testing, how other testers approach this problem and what tools they are using for this. On my personal research, I have found lots of information from testing community. I would like to share the information to our Software Testing Newsletter.

Cross Browser Testing

Cross browser testing is a type of compatibility testing designed to ensure that a web application behaves correctly (sometimes identically) in several different browsers and/or browser versions.

Browser Compatibility Checklists

Heres a handy browser testing checklist to refer while testing the web project on different browsers and operating systems: 1) CSS validation 2) HTML or XHTML validation 3) Page validations with and without JavaScript enabled 4) Ajax and JQeury functionality 5) Font size validation 6) Page layout in different resolutions 7) All images and alignment 8 ) Header and footer sections 9) Page content alignment to center, LHS or RHS 10) Page styles 11) Date formats 12) Special characters with HTML character encoding 13) Page zoom-in and zoom-out functionality

06 September 2012

And obviously you will have to repeat these tests on: 14) Different Operating Systems like Windows, Linux and Mac 15) Different browsers (with different versions) like Internet explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.

Cross-Browser Testing Tools (Free and Commercial)

IE Tester: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

BrowseEmAll: http://www.browseemall.com/?utm_expid=57129852-1 SuperPreview: http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/dd565874.aspx Browsera: http://www.browsera.com/ BrowserShots: http://browsershots.org/ Spoon.net: http://spoon.net/browsers CrossBrowserTesting: http://crossbrowsertesting.com/ SauceLabs: https://saucelabs.com/features TestStudio: http://www.telerik.com/automated-testing-tools Adobe BrowserLab: https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html Selenium: http://seleniumhq.org/ Lunascape 6: http://www.lunascape.tv/

Validation Checkers:
HTML, XHTML Validators: http://validator.w3.org/ CSS Validators: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

06 September 2012

Estimating Risk of Bugs

This information represented graphically below helps to explain a particular test strategy of probability of finding the bugs to the team. If you have one or more browsers in the red or amber area then this is probably where the testers should turn their thoughts first and Browsers in the green area then follows.

06 September 2012