In the last post, we already discussed what a cookie is and how and when they are used. So let us explore a little more about these cookies. Here we are going to discuss how the websites that use cookies are tested.
Disabling the cookie
Disabling the cookie feature is perhaps the easiest concept under website cookie testing. Disabling the cookies is the first step in web site cookie testing.
- How the turning off or disabling of the cookies does affects a web site? You can check out by yourself.
- Clean up all the cookies and close all the open browser windows of the site that is to be tested.
- When you close the browser windows, the session cookies are automatically deleted.
- Keep the cookie folder open while you are browsing the site.
- You have to close the browser in order to delete all the cookies.
- You will notice that as you close the browser, the session cookies are automatically deleted.
- Now you disable the cookies and try using the features of the website.
- You will observe that most of the features do not work since the cookies have been disabled.
- So we can conclude that the disabling the cookies, disables the functionality of the web site.
To use the website, the cookies must be enabled.
- The question here worth asking is that whether or not the server of that website is able to recognize its failure while attempting to set the cookies?
- And if it is recognizing also, does it send a notification or a message to user stating that the cookies must be enable in order for that web site to work?
- If this is not the case then the user will keep on trying to use the web site and will get frustrated without knowing that why the web site is not responding.
Amazon.com is one of the websites that work well even without the cookies. In such kind of web sites, the maintenance of the state if taken care of by the server side on the basis of the session ID stated at the end of the URL of the home page.
The URL of the home page of the web site was:
www.amazon.com/…/home.html/104-0233809-0567844
- The rightmost digit was changed from 4 to 5 and reposted in the URL.
- Amazon discards the edited URL and effectively recovers from the URL corruption by creating a URL with the help of a new session ID:
www.amazon.com/…/home.html/107-0357660-1139507
- From the above observation we conclude that the above hypothesis is correct.
To understand the test cases you need to understand how the cookies work and how they are stored and how the cookie settings can be edited? Here we are going to list some test cases for web site cookie testing:
- In concern to your privacy, the cookie privacy policy takes care that your personal data is not stored or used by the cookie.
- If no, then the cookie will save your sensitive data in an encrypted format.
- Always make sure that there is no over usage of cookies on the web site under test.This can annoy the users since the browser will prompt for cookies more often and this can cause a decline in the site traffic.
- If the site under test makes use of cookies, then it will not function properly on the disabling of cookies. Try to navigate through the website and use the features. But, make sure that the web site does not crash.
- Corruption of cookies
Change the values of the cookies to some vague values by editing them in note pad. You may later the contents of the cookie or change the parameters and observer the behavior of the website.
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