A Comprehensive Guide on SharePoint Testing

15 years ago Microsoft introduced SharePoint Package which turned out to be the most successful enterprise product. SharePoint is a content management system with an intranet-enabled document library that enables work collaboration capabilities. Most of the Fortune-100 companies leverage the power of SharePoint. With such utility, SharePoint is expected to be high on demand.

Developing new applications with the SharePoint framework is very easy however, SharePoint application testing is paramount to ensure a better quality application.

Plan Before You Proceed To Sharepoint Testing Procedure

It is very important to plan out the procedure before starting the testing to make sure that the software testing process is smooth. You’ll first have to define the testing purpose to the project team. You have to make a list of documents that will be included in the testing process. In addition to that, you must have a list that mentioned all the relevant access rights, business policies, and other requirements for data protection.

Define the servers and networks to be used for the testing environment, also mention the list of monitoring and reporting tools too. You also need to define the expected outcomes and the success threshold. Let’s get a deeper understanding of SharePoint Testing.

SharePoint Testing Best Practices

Testing is crucial for quality assurance. By following Microsoft SharePoint testing best practices, you can perform thorough testing on a web-based collaborative platform named SharePoint and achieve the high-end results at the end. SharePoint is popular in creating different business solutions. According to that feature, you can use it for file and document management, websites, business intelligence, collaboration, social networks, extranets, enterprise search, and many more. In addition, it is capable of automating workflows and involves process and system integration.   

 Apart from this, Microsoft Corporation developed this web app platform for fulfilling the needs of small- and large-scale companies and for various work purposes. However, testing SharePoint applications is a very challenging task because there are numerous things included in it. For example,   

• Insights  

• Composites  

• Content  

• Sites  

• Communities  

Thus, members of the SharePoint testing team should have a sharepoint testing checklist that must focus on all the factors that could affect the ultimate output. These can be:  

• Authorization and Authentication  

• Site Architecture and Server Farms  

• Web Applications Architecture and Deployment  

• Enterprise Search  

• Social Networks Features  

• Web Parts  

• WCM & ECM Considerations  

All these factors play a critical role in assuring the quality if it is tested well by the technical QA team. Moreover, the QA (Quality Assurance) teams should have knowledge and expertise of using this platform, and they should know about specific technologies used by SharePoint. Besides, it is possible to test web apps that are developed on the SharePoint platform. Still, you must have effective test cases and test best practices before carrying out testing of the various layers of this platform. 

Furthermore, testing teams should be dedicated enough to understand the features and functionalities of the application. Also, they should have functional testing skills and proficiency to ensure that the app/software/product will work as expected and fulfil all the requirements as per the user.   

Before performing functional testing, one should have sufficient SharePoint test cases to ensure that each element will work accurately. For example, in the functionality testing of SharePoint, databases are at the core of any organization. Thus, it is necessary to keep the information clean, up-to-date, and easily searchable. You must include at least adding, deleting, and updating elements in your test cases, and they should be appropriately linked on internal pages, external pages, and other domains. Make sure there will be no orphan pages or broken links found in your pages or domains. Moreover, you must include forms to ensure that information will transmit through the intended database without being corrupted.    Additionally, there are various other factors that you need to keep in mind for SharePoint Testing, such as compatibility testing, Performance testing, Security testing, Interface testing, and Usability testing.   

Also, it would be great if you think about all possible problems raised by SharePoint’s native limits. For example, the maximum size of files by type or the number of users in a group. Some other relevant constraints involve  

• 2GB max file size of lists and libraries  

• 10MB max for Excel books  

• 5,000 max group members  

• Each member is part of a maximum of 5,000 groups (highly unlikely)  

• 5,000 synced items in a library  

• Up to 20,000 items in the OneDrive Business library, including files and folders  

All these factors you should keep in mind before testing your SharePoint because it requires excellent planning and huge attention to detail to ensure the app’s compatibility between components and versions. However, if you want to remove all errors and ensure the smooth working of the Microsoft SharePoint, in that case, you can consider the reliable software testing company because it has a Selenium framework to test web applications, and it can help you get the best user’s experience. 

To help you avoid unnecessary issues and set up the SharePoint accurately, here are some SharePoint monitoring best practices that you can check below to improve the end-user experience and business continuity strategy in few simple steps.

• Set The Testing Goals

The first thing in a testing project is formulating the exact performance requirements along a dedicated sharepoint test plan that contains the execution approach, methodologies, as well as the selection guide to sharepoint testing tools. As per your goals of SharePoint performance tests, you’ll have to measure and validate numerous performance parameters. You need to be careful about the custom-developed components as they generally add the most prominent problems to the system operation.

• Organize The Testing Environment

In some cases, it might be impossible for testing the production version of your system. So, you must create a copy of it, which must be configured to the production copy closely. It means that you must clone not only the SharePoint server farm but also the SQL server and all the supporting services. You must include the load balancer as well if you have one.

• Design Testing

Choose the typical user sessions carefully you are going to use in the test cases for sharepoint application, don’t try covering all the paths in your application. You must emphasize on the validation of the page content and insert auto checks for confirming that significant steps end up incorrect server responses.

• Go For Load Generation Components

You must go for proper software and hardware components for the test load generation. You need to check the capacity of a single load agent for your specific test, increase the load while all other system resources (like CPU, network usage percentage, and memory) are below critical values. After the maximum load per unit gets determined, then you must plan the number of generating units you require for the entire test.

SharePoint Testing Using Selenium   

Basically, Selenium is one of the best automation testing tools that you can use to test any web application, like Sharepoint. It is feasible to automate Share Point Online (SPO) using Selenium since there are two ways of testing a web application: Selenium IDE and Selenium WebDriver. 

Thus, you can choose any of them to get your test done, but make sure Selenium IDE is a web browser plugin used to record testing steps, which can be played and used for quick testing. Moreover, Selenium IDE generates an HTML-based file that records all the steps and helps you perform the testing in a very simple language.   

On the other hand, Selenium WebDriver is a robust way of conducting SharePoint automated testing. It provides you with a plethora of languages and helps in writing automation-based test cases. One of the great benefits of using Selenium WebDriver is that it is a script-sharing platform that you can choose to create your own testing framework and easy to perform efficient and quick testing.    

SharePoint Testing Checklist

Once you are done with the testing process, you’ll get numerous charts and numbers in the report. There will be a few things you must check for all sharepoint test cases before execution. Doing so, enables you to foster an advanced sharepoint testing checklist that can be followed during future projects and for all the varying SharePoint testing tools you might use.

1. All the user sessions executed in the test must be emulated properly. If you find multiple sessions fail at the same request, you must research this in the logs. One more issue that might invalidate results is the performance of the testing environment. You need to check the CPU and network usage levels need to be below 100% during the test.

2. The error rate must be at an acceptable level i.e. below 1%. You must analyze the error rate for particular pages like in case the error rate for search requests is greater than for other transactions, you might need to analyze the database performance.  

3. Usually, response time increases with increasing speed. You need to regularly check that the average time for every test period must remain below the target value. Don’t address very short periods with countable responses, because this data might be misleading or occasional. You must check the average response time for every page request as it comprises static calls that might be processed very fast.

4. The number of processed requests and completed sessions every second is a significant aspect indicating the general system capacity. In normal system operation, it must change in line with the increasing test load. If you find it is becoming constant, it indicates that the system has reached its performance limit. For checking the network and web server capacity, it is necessary to check the amount of uploaded and downloaded data.

5. At the end, you must take a glance at the values of performance encounters for specific servers, it will enable you to identify the weak components of the system.

SharePoint testing will need a great share of planning and careful consideration. The capacities of programs will get balanced by the requirement to pay attention to every single detail and ensure compatibility amongst components and versions. This way, every business owner can expect high-quality, accurate, productive outputs and a great user experience.