Every aspiring programmer needs to know about the stages a web application goes through before users see it in their browsers. Each of these stages is covered by its own testing, so it's important to understand which testing is responsible for each stage.

Let's go through the main and most commonly used stages.

Planning

At this stage, project requirements, goals, and objectives are defined. Although testing is not yet conducted at this stage, it is important to consider testing needs during planning.

This stage rarely involves programmers, as it is managed by project managers. Therefore, the only testing element present here is Risk Management, which, as the name suggests, assesses the risks associated with the project's development.

Design and Prototyping

During the design stage, the architecture of the application is developed, and prototypes are created. Programmers are brought in at this stage to write prototypes of the application to be used. However, testing is not frequently used here; primarily, tests related to user interface convenience and usability are used. In other words, usability testing of prototypes is used at this stage to evaluate the user interface's ease of use.

Development

This stage is one of the key stages where developers go through the concept stage and start coding. Developers begin writing code, and this is where the testing you will be learning about comes into play.

During this stage, testing methods such as Unit Testing and Integration Testing are employed. These are testing stages that do not require the full functionality of the application since they test individual modules in isolation and their interaction with each other.

Testing

After the development stage, the next logical step is the testing phase of the developed application. This is also the responsibility of developers as they test their product for proper functionality and operation. Various final stages are employed here, such as:

• System Testing: Checking the entire system as a whole;
• Performance Testing and Load Testing: Testing the application's behavior under various load levels;
• Security Testing: Identifying security vulnerabilities in the application;
• Compatibility Testing: Verifying the application's functionality across different browsers and devices.

These are not the types of testing we will be covering in this course, so we won't delve into them separately.

Deployment

At this stage, the application is deployed in the production environment. The following tests may be conducted:

Smoke Testing: A basic check to ensure that core functions are working correctly after deployment.

Conclusion

This chapter has turned out to be quite text-heavy, but it provides theoretical knowledge that will help you better understand what happens during application development. Even when you write your own website or application, I recommend adhering to such stages as they allow for the proper and efficient development of applications.