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Web Application Testing: Tips & Best Practices

Web application testing is a process that ensures the application is ready to launch without safety concerns and reliability issues. Our main point of concern in web application testing is making sure that the security is up to the standard as security becomes a bigger and bigger issue on the internet with each passing day.

Web Application Testing: Tips & Best Practices
Nedim Maric
December 21, 2022
3 minutes

What is Web Application Testing?

Web application testing is a process that ensures the application is ready to launch without safety concerns and reliability issues. Our main point of concern in web application testing is making sure that the security is up to the standard as security becomes a bigger and bigger issue on the internet with each passing day. 

Even more importantly, properly testing your application could potentially save you thousands upon thousands of dollars, as you won’t have to deal with constant pushbacks due to security issues.

Top Tips for Successfully Performing Web Application Testing

Regardless of the size of your application, web application testing is absolutely essential in making sure you are ahead of the curve in optimizing your code. 

The first step is always to perform an in-depth analysis of your application, identify weak points, and move on from there. This will give you a general idea of the scope you are working with and you will be able to prioritize testing based on the initial test results. 

Automation is not enough

Even though automated testing is taking over nowadays, it’s usually a good idea to use some manual testing as well in order to get the full picture. The combination of the two is usually the winning approach, and as such, you will not have doubts and concerns over potential holes in your application knowing that both the human and the machine had a good hard look at it. 

Input And Output Are Crucial

For most applications, input handlers are quite often the weak point that gets exploited in all sorts of ways. This is why you have to pay special attention to both input & output in your application’s processes and test them heavily in order to make sure that nobody unauthorized can enter your application through these channels. 

Learn more in our detailed guide to penetration testing tools.

Think Like an Attacker

If you ever watched a buddy cop movie, you probably heard of the saying “think like a criminal”. Well, in this case, it applies perfectly! When testing your application, try to put yourself in a hacker’s mindset, and figure out what could be the main points of attack on your app. This will give you a different perspective, and often the more correct one, when dealing with potential vulnerabilities.

Related content: Read our guide to penetration testing in aws.

Have Bright Do It For You

If you try to follow all the correct steps in web application testing, it would probably get you a long way, but it would also take up a lot of your precious time. As we all know, time is money nowadays, which is why you probably can’t afford to spend months testing the security of your application before launching it.

This is where Bright comes in – we specialize in finding and remediating all vulnerabilities that your web application might come across. Try us out now – your application will be thanking us!

What Our Customers Say About Us

"Empowering our developers with Bright Security's DAST has been pivotal at SentinelOne. It's not just about protecting systems; it's about instilling a culture where security is an integral part of development, driving innovation and efficiency."

Kunal Bhattacharya | Head of Application Security

"Bright DAST has transformed how we approach AST at SXI, Inc. Its seamless CI/CD
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Carlo M. Camerino | Chief Technology Officer

"Bright Security has helped us shift left by automating AppSec scans and regression testing early in development while also fostering better collaboration between R&D teams and raising overall security posture and awareness. Their support has been consistently fast and helpful."

Amit Blum | Security team lead

"Bright Security enabled us to significantly improve our application security coverage and remediate vulnerabilities much faster. Bright Security has reduced the amount of wall clock hours AND man hours we used to spend doing preliminary scans on applications by about 70%."

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Bobby Kuzma | ProCircular

"Since implementing Bright's DAST scanner, we have markedly improved the efficiency of our runtime scanning. Despite increasing the cadence of application testing, we've noticed no impact to application stability using the tool. Additionally, the level of customer support has been second to none. They have been committed to ensuring our experience with the product has been valuable and have diligently worked with us to resolve any issues and questions."

AppSec Leader | Prominent Midwestern Bank

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