GSM vs CDMA

1. GSM structure limits the number of users at certain QOS while CDMA system allows graceful degradation of QOS with increase in number of users within the cell

2. GSM works on hexagonal cell structure where each adjacent cell are having different frequency for operation and each cell can communicate with a maximum of fix number of mobile
users while CDMA there is not strict cell structure and every mobile user uses the entire freqency band.

3. GSM cells are relatively small in size and power efficient for mobile users while CDMA cells are big in size can accomodate more number of users but they are not as power efficient as GSM cells.

3. Hacking a GSM system is relatively easy than CDMA. CDMA is secure in this term

4. GSM system is popular in commercial application where QOS is more important while CDMA is popular for millitary and scientific experiments where data security and other issues are important. There days CDMA system is getting more popular due to no hard limit on number of users

Cookie testing

What is Cookie?
Cookie is small information stored in text file on user’s hard drive by web server. This information is later used by web browser to retrieve information from that machine. Generally cookie contains personalized user data or information that is used to communicate between different web pages.

Why Cookies are used?
Cookies are nothing but the user’s identity and used to track where the user navigated throughout the web site pages. The communication between web browser and web server is stateless.

Generally two types of cookies are written on the user machine.

1. Session cookies: This cookie is active till the browser that invoked the cookie is open. When we close the browser this session cookie gets deleted. Some time session of say 20 minutes can be set to expire the cookie.

2. Persistent cookies: The cookies that are written permanently on user machine and lasts for months or years.

Test cases:

1. As a Cookie privacy policy make sure from your design documents that no personal or sensitive data is stored in the cookie.

2. If you have no option than saving sensitive data in cookie make sure data stored in cookie is stored in encrypted format.

3. Make sure that there is no overuse of cookies on your site under test. Overuse of cookies will annoy users if browser is prompting for cookies more often and this could result in loss of site traffic and eventually loss of business.

4. Disable the cookies from your browser settings: If you are using cookies on your site, your sites major functionality will not work by disabling the cookies. Then try to access the web site under test. Navigate through the site. See if appropriate messages are displayed to the user like “For smooth functioning of this site make sure that cookies are enabled on your browser”. There should not be any page crash due to disabling the cookies. (Please make sure that you close all browsers, delete all previously written cookies before performing this test)

5. Accepts/Reject some cookies: The best way to check web site functionality is to not accept all cookies. If you are writing 10 cookies in your web application, then randomly accept some cookies, say accept 5 and reject 5 cookies. For executing this test case you can set browser options to prompt whenever cookie is being written to disk. On this prompt window you can either accept or reject cookie. Try to access a major feature of web site. Check if pages crash or data becomes corrupt.

6. Delete cookie: Allow site to write the cookies and then close all browsers and manually delete all cookies for web site under test. Access the web pages and check the behavior of the pages.

7. Corrupt the cookies: Corrupting a cookie is easy. You know where cookies are stored. Manually edit the cookie in notepad and change the parameters to some vague values. You can alter the cookie content, the name of the cookie or expiry date of the cookie and check the site functionality. In some cases, corrupted cookies allow other domains to read the data inside them. This should not happen in case of your web site cookies. Note that the cookies written by one domain say rediff.com can’t be accessed by other domain say yahoo.com unless and until the cookies are corrupted and someone tries to hack the cookie data.

8. Checking the deletion of cookies from your web application page: Sometimes a cookie written by a domain, say rediff.com may be deleted by the same domain but by a different page under that domain. This is the general case if you are testing some ‘action tracking’ web portal. Action tracking or purchase tracking pixel is placed on the action web page and when any action or purchase occurs by the user, the cookie written on the disk is deleted to avoid multiple action logging from same cookie. Check if reaching your action or purchase page deletes the cookie properly and no more invalid actions or purchases get logged from the same user.

9. Cookie Testing on Multiple browsers: It is an important to check if your web application page is writing the cookies properly on different browsers as intended and site works properly using these cookies. You can test your web application on popular browsers like Internet explorer (Various versions), Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera etc.

10. If your web application is using cookies to maintain the logging state of any user, then log in to your web application using some username and password. In many cases you can see the logged in user ID parameter directly in browser address bar. Change this parameter to different value say if previous user ID is 100 then make it 101 and press enter. The proper access message should be displayed to user and user should not be able to see other users account.

These are some Major test cases to be considered while testing website cookies. You can write multiple test cases from these test cases by performing various combinations. If you have some different application scenarios, you can mention your test cases