The right approach for testing the ERP applications

Enterprises are realizing the need to leverage the SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud) model to accelerate growth. However, overhauling core processes administered by legacy ERP applications is equally critical. ERP applications help enterprises manage various functions, departments, and processes, including the data generated therein.

These applications help enterprises to run as one single unit and, in the process, generate outcomes such as improved productivity, better efficiency, reduced waste, enhanced customer experience, and increased ROI. In view of the criticality of ERP applications for organizations, they should be tested and validated. Testing ERP applications can ensure the smooth functioning of multiple tasks within organizations. These may include tracking inventory and customer transactions, managing finances and human resources, among many others.

Why is ERP software testing needed?

ERP software is cost-intensive and requires a lot of investment in time and effort. Every ERP software comes with multiple versions and requires customization to suit specific business requisites. Moreover, since every element in the application is connected to some other module, upgrading them can be a challenging task. For example, creating a sales order would need access to the inventory management module. If any of the modules does not function to its optimum, the entire ERP application may be impacted. This can have a cascading effect on the performance of the company as well as create bad customer experiences. Hence, testing ERP applications shall ensure the correct implementation of the software and prevent crashes.

ERP software testing, besides checking the software’s functionalities, should ensure the generation of reports and forms accurately. By identifying and removing bugs during the testing phase, testers can avoid facing post-implementation blues. Moreover, it can lead to an early adoption of software and ensure its smooth running. ERP application testing services validate business processes, functions, and the rules governing them. They help reduce operational risks within the constraints of available resources and time.

Approaching the testing of ERP applications

It is imperative for enterprises to set up a robust testing strategy. The strategy should prioritize the testing of processes depending on the short and long-term goals.

Setting up KPIs: At the outset, testers should setup the KPIs or performance metrics and evaluate how they will impact the overall organizational goal as well as departmental objectives. Thus, establishing the KPIs will help derive the right ROI for the organization.

All-encompassing: ERP implementation for a large organization with many departments and processes can be a complex and challenging job. However, it is important that all stakeholders are taken into confidence and involved in the process. The process also includes making the necessary investment in training. When everyone is involved in ERP implementation, there is more cohesiveness in the administration of the software.

Data migration: An organization can plan its strategic moves if it can make use of its data emanating from various processes over a period of time. To ensure real data is not lost or distorted in any way during ERP validation and testing, its proper migration process should be planned beforehand.

Selecting the right automation tools: As ERP software can have myriad variables interfacing with various processes, they need to be validated. This requires choosing the right test automation tools - open-source or premium ones. Automated ERP testing can validate a large number of variables for various processes against expected outcomes. The right automation tool will help testers to write and execute test cases.

Identifying test cases: Since it is not possible to test every sinew of an ERP application, proper test cases should be written to ensure the maximum test coverage. Thus, testers should identify the test cases for each test and document them as well. Also, since ERP processes are linked to each other, and even to third-party applications or modules, they should undergo automated ERP testing.

Conducting performance, regression, and security tests: As an ERP system helps to run the operations of an enterprise as a single unit, it should run some critical tests. These include regression, performance, integration, security, and usability tests. This way the enterprise can ensure continuous monitoring of the system, save time and cost, and prevent any sudden downtime or latency.

Proper documentation: Post testing of components in the ERP system, the documented glitches ought to be analyzed to preempt any failure in a real environment. Moreover, the reports can be used for future reference.

Conclusion

To sustain in the competitive business environment of today, businesses need to take digital initiatives such as implementing an ERP solution. However, to ensure the successful running of such a solution and derive benefits out of it, enterprises should carry out ERP testing. The approach for such a testing should involve automation and carrying out various types of testing.

What are the main challenges of Mobile Test Automation?

Organizations are releasing mobile apps in quick succession to leverage the growing appetite of tech-savvy customers. However, not every app receives user acceptance owing to a range of issues. These include functional defects, below-par performance, device incompatibility, and poor user experience. As users become more critical of such issues and are deluged with a range of alternatives, mobile application testing has become important. Surprisingly, most organizations are yet to embrace mobile test automation even as they slug it out to release newer variants of apps. So, what challenges do enterprises face when they go about conducting mobile test automation? Let us describe some of the biggest ones:

Biggest challenges for testing mobile applications

The list of challenges bedeviling the mobile test exercise is -

1.      Quick release schedules: With customers rooting for mobile apps in greater numbers, enterprises don’t want to be a late entrant and miss the bus. They go for quick build and release cycles where a thorough round of testing often becomes a casualty. Also, due to the pressing schedules, enterprises neither integrate new tests into their test cycles nor have the time to write test scripts. With DevOps and Agile being the methodologies to develop glitch-free applications, the need has arisen to develop a test suite. The suite should be underpinned on continuous innovation to address the dynamics of a complex mobile environment. However, this makes the test cycle lengthy with the release of new devices, operating systems and their variants, features, and functionalities.

2.      Choosing the right mobile app test automation tool: Every mobile app comes with different test challenges where no two are similar. Although the market is flush with many automation tools, the challenge is to find the right one that addresses the specific test requirement. So, to choose the right mobile application QA testing tool, enterprises should meet certain standards:

·         Ease of use and the ability to create a script

·   Ought to run on native and object web properties for better identification of the components

·         Ability to connect to the cloud

·         Enable more than functional testing

3.      Security: Given its growing ramifications on brand equity and user experience, security testing has become a challenging exercise. The reason being the umpteen vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to steal data or information. When it comes to the cloud, it is better to rely on a private cloud, for it provides better encryption. Also, preventing data breach on a public cloud platform should be given serious consideration by implementing mobile testing. Further, DevOps should be changed to DevSecOps for better security compliance and accountability across the organization.

4.      Diversity in devices: The mobile ecosystem has numerous mobile devices with different configurations. Such device diversity makes mobile app testing a challenging task, especially for native, hybrid, and web apps. Moreover, the type of testing differs as well vis-a-vis compatibility, performance, stress, conformance, and security. Even though native apps have a limited scope of testing, their hybrid and web counterparts are needed to be tested for on and off platforms. This can create knotty back-end issues. Both native and hybrid apps should be tested on various device platforms to ensure outcomes like quick and seamless download, performance, platform interaction, and updates.

5.      Diversity in OS platforms: One of the most challenging scenarios in mobile test automation is to account for the fast-changing operating systems and their variants. With devices operating on different variants of Android, iOS or Windows operating systems at any point in time, mobile testing can become complicated. These mainly relate to the compatibility issues when apps are deployed across operating environments. However, these can be addressed by following solutions -

·         Putting emulators into use to identify glitches and security issues

·         Testing on a set of popularly used devices and target users.

·   Using a mix of both in-house mobile lab and cloud based mobile QA testing

Conclusion

The widespread usage of mobile apps and their interfaces with myriad thirty party sites have meant vulnerabilities can creep into the system, anytime and anywhere. Also, since a significant number of mobile apps carry critical financial and personal information, they should be guarded against all kinds of cyber threats. A thorough mobile application testing framework can help identify such glitches and deliver great user experiences.

How Healthcare Transformation can evolve in the coming years

The relentless journey of digitalization has touched every sector of the economy, including healthcare. If we look at healthcare as a microcosm then there has been a lot of progress made in the past decades. The development of new medicines and diagnostic tools has revolutionized the sector for the better. This has led to a significant decline in the mortality and morbidity rates globally. Importantly, pestilences like smallpox or plague have become a thing of the past. However, with tremendous progress in various fields, new challenges too seem to have plagued the sector. These include the germination of drug resistant microbes and the gaining prominence of lifestyle diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and stress, among others. Further, cancer continues to wreak havoc across demographics with a comprehensive cure remaining elusive.

The buzz around healthcare transformation through digitalization has brought in a slew of benefits. This includes managing the burgeoning healthcare sector with AI-enabled medical devices, telemedicine, or blockchain-driven electronic health records. Digitalization in hospitals and nursing homes has brought about a comprehensive improvement in their delivery of services. For example, a computer-based system creates electronic records of patients arriving at the hospital and then manages them seamlessly, right from the admission stage to the eventual discharge. Also, various types of apps tailor-made to monitor the health of individuals have become commonplace.

Medical practitioners have become dependent on the smooth functioning of medical devices to diagnose and treat patients. With so much at stake, glitches in such devices or tools can play havoc with the lives of patients. This is where healthcare app testing should become an integral part of the software development pipeline. Let us understand how healthcare transformation is going to evolve in the coming years.

How digital transformation in healthcare can benefit people

The technology and knowledge intensive healthcare sector has seen end-users using apps to derive benefits like connecting to a doctor, buying medicines, or doing diagnostics tests, among others.

Connecting to the doctor: This can often be a matter of life and death as the right doctor can diagnose an ailment quickly and begin the treatment process. However, customers often lack the wherewithal to evaluate the parameters of a healthcare provider. But with healthcare app testing, patients can use a robust app to make informed decisions about their health. Imagine making an appointment with your doctor for a house call or clinic visit from your smartphone, the same way you would book an Uber cab.

Leveraging big data: Big data can analyze trends or patterns from sets of data received through channels such as online transactions, social media, and eCommerce. These can accrue a number of benefits such as:

·         Low rate of medication errors: After analyzing the patients’ records, the software can identify incongruities in terms of prescriptions and patients’ health. These can alert medical professionals to take corrective measures and offer an effective treatment. The quality of such software can be enhanced through healthcare software testing.

·         Preventive care: A large number of people flock to various departments and add to the already existing pool of patients. Many a time, these people do not require to be there in the first place. Big data analysis can identify such people and prevent them from crowding the wrong department. Thus, healthcare testing services can ensure such software applications with interfaces to big data perform accurately.

·         Accurate staffing: Healthcare facilities can be overwhelmed at times with a large influx of patients. By undertaking big data analysis, healthcare service providers can predict such influx and optimize the allocation of workforce. This way the waiting time for patients at various departments can be reduced drastically.

·         Wearable medical devices: Healthcare application testing can preempt the malfunctioning or inaccuracies of wearable devices, which collect health-related data from patients. The wearable device market is likely to be around $27 billion by 2024 (Source: marketwatch.com). The devices come in the form of heart rate sensors, sweat meters, oximeters, and exercise trackers, among others. These devices offer a personalized healthcare experience to the patients and help insurance companies to rate a patient’s risk for illness.

Conclusion

The healthcare industry is undergoing a tectonic shift in favor of technology. This will lead to better diagnosis and treatment of ailments. Moreover, healthcare apps are helping patients to know more about their diseases and the likely treatment protocols to be followed. Patients draw a lot of information from various apps or websites, which were earlier the exclusive preserve of the medical professionals. Healthcare application testing helps in identifying glitches in the applications and ensure they deliver the right outcomes.

How can IoT Testing be improved with the right framework

With digital technology driving the world and making the lives of people easier than ever before, the quest is for making it more decentralized, distributed, and easy to handle. This is where the Internet of Things (IoT) comes across as a technology of the future. It entails changing the lives of people by taking computing to the physical realm. This may include devices, buildings, vehicles, sensors, electronics, and networks, among others. Even though IoT brings many benefits including increased automation of tasks, running such interconnected devices flawlessly can be a challenge. This is due to the heterogeneity of such devices and their need to display coordinated behavior in real-time. So, let us first understand what IoT is all about?

What is IoT?

Here, physical elements comprising buildings, vehicles, home appliances, and other elements are embedded with software, electronics, and sensors to exchange data and information over the internet. These devices are increasingly adopted by the industry to derive a range of benefits. It may include cost reduction and increased revenue generation through automated operations and improved efficiency. The speed of adoption of such devices is driven by various factors such as increased bandwidth and processing power, a growing pool of tech-savvy consumers, the advent of new analytical tools, and the low cost of sensors. Given the competitive nature of today’s business environment, enterprises are looking to generate greater revenues and deliver better customer experiences.

However, notwithstanding the slew of benefits such devices bring to the consumers, building them in the form of a network remains a challenging and complex activity. Since such devices have interfaces with a lot of digital elements, there can be issues of interoperability, security, scalability, coordination, and conformation. Nevertheless, IoT is on its way to become arguably the biggest opportunity for software development and testing. The IoT ecosystem will have an eclectic amalgamation of products like home appliances, embedded sensors, buildings, vehicles, and actuators, among other things. To enable the smooth functioning of such an ecosystem, IoT testing has become a critical requirement of the industry. If statistics are to be believed, then by 2020, around 30 billion products might become a part of the IoT ecosystem (Source: McKinsey.)

What are the benefits of IoT testing?

The importance of IoT-enabled devices in the digital ecosystem meant these have to be tested rigorously to gain a slew of benefits. These include

·         Making the business future-proof in terms of interoperability, adoption of technologies, scalability, security, and other parameters

·         Delivering the best user experiences across channels through automation

·         Delivering quicker access to the markets using test automation

What are the challenges for testing IoT applications?

The testing of IoT-enabled devices entails many challenges due to the presence of diverse devices and the need for their seamless coordination and collaboration. The other challenges are:

·         Dealing with the diversity of elements comprising the IoT ecosystem

·         Ensuring high security for data transmission

·         Adhering to a slew of IoT protocols viz., CoAP, XMPP, MQTT, and others

·         Achieving quick responsiveness in real-time

·         Support for scalability and interoperability

Developing the right framework for Internet of Things testing

To overcome the challenges associated with IoT device testing, a robust IoT testing framework should be put in place. Although designing such a framework would depend on the configurations of specific IoT devices to be tested, it should have some basic features.

Data Recorders: These can help in validating various IoT-enabled devices vis-a-vis their compatibility across communication layers.

Protocol Simulators: The IoT testing methodology involves working with many protocols. Protocol simulators can facilitate IoT testing when there are multiple interfaces of devices and their end-points.

Building Labs: These can help in simulating real-time experiences and deriving suitable inferences in the process.

Virtualization: Any real-time validation of the highly complex IoT application can be challenging and time-consuming. Thus, to reduce the dependency on a real-time environment, certain testing services or parameters can be virtualized. 

Any IoT testing framework should comprise a series of tests to check various layers and their interaction with each other.

Application layer: Functional testing, compatibility testing, usability and user experience testing, localization testing, and API testing.

Services layer: Interoperability testing, functional testing, and API testing.

Gateway and Network layer: Network compatibility and connectivity testing.

Sensor layer: Functional and security testing

Conclusion

The Internet of Things is going to drive the future and will have an eclectic mix of devices/elements such as datacentre, sensors, applications, and networks. Since a lot would be at stake based on the correct behavior of IoT-enabled devices, the IoT testing approach should be all-encompassing and rigorous. Hence, developing the right framework for testing IoT-enabled devices should be the priority, which in turn can ensure these devices to remain programmable, communicable, and operable across the industry.

What is the importance of ERP testing?

Today’s enterprises are subjected to a lot of pulls and pressures - from the markets, competitors, customers, and stakeholders, among others. They need to be up with the times in terms of technology, processes, and general market trends to meet their productivity and sales targets. However, given their footprints, in many cases, lying across territories, they need to remain connected with their branches, employees, and stakeholders, in real time. This is where an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software can help matters by tying the organization in a single unit.

The ERP software enables an organization to run smoothly by collating all data generated from various units. It helps stakeholders to analyze such data and get insights into the processes and requirements in real time. The insights can further help in formulating and implementing strategies on the ground to remain competitive. An ERP software can have interfaces with various departments within an organization viz., finance, human resources, administration, supply-chain management, and customer relationship management, among others. By streamlining business processes and eliminating manual work, an ERP software suite can help improve productivity and efficiency, enhance the quality and speed of delivery, and achieve ROI.

Since the ERP software can be the virtual lifeline of an organization, its effectiveness needs to be top-notch at any given point in time. This is of utmost importance as any software glitch can bring processes to a standstill by giving erroneous inputs to the respective departments. To ensure smooth functioning of the software system under severe test conditions, ERP testing should be made a routine exercise. Nowadays, enterprises deploy third-party resources to manage various tasks owing to the latter’s core competencies. These resources are accessed (both ways) through the cloud or mobile services. To ensure a smooth progression of such services, businesses should brace themselves for testing ERP solutions. This is in alignment with the objectives of Agile or Lean methodologies. Let us understand in detail as to what an ERP testing exercise can deliver -

Why ERP quality assurance and testing?

For beginners, ERP testing is a QA process to ensure the comprehensive software suite is made fully operational before deployment. It checks various units, features, and functionalities of the software against a set of parameters or metrics. The various tests that are part of the ERP QA include functionality testing, performance testing, integration testing, user acceptance testing, and unit testing, among others. So, why do we go for ERP validation in the first place?

Time saving: During ERP implementation, any glitch can derail the functioning of the software or generate erroneous results. To identify such glitches, the testing team needs to unscramble each of the integrated units. This can be hugely time-consuming leading to delays. However, should testing ERP solutions be a part of the SLDC in the Agile format, considerable time can be saved in mitigating glitches.

Early mitigation of glitches: By following a shift-left automated ERP testing process, glitches can be identified quickly. Since both testing and development processes take place in a sprint, identification and mitigation of glitches can be quick.

Data security: One of the biggest issues plaguing the digital ecosystem is data security or the lack of it. Moreover, since an ERP system pools data from disparate sources to a centralized repository, hackers can exploit the data pool. An ERP centre of excellence can leverage the right tools to verify the centralized database. This way, it can secure the database by removing any inherent vulnerabilities.

Improved productivity: An operational ERP software can identify the operational needs and verify the presence of inventories. It can ensure the proper deployment of resources, thereby saving time and cost. Also, automated testing can get around the slow response times of manual testing and improve productivity.

Achieves ROI: An efficient ERP system can deliver suitable outcomes within tight turnarounds thereby saving time and cost for the organization. Moreover, by streamlining processes, breaking silos, and attending to customer feedback promptly, the organization can deliver better user experiences. A happy end-customer will generate better sales and enhance brand equity through word-of-mouth. This leads to better ROI for the organization.

Conclusion

Testing of ERP applications entails the validation of their performance, functionality, user acceptability, and security. Its absence can have serious implications for the business processes, configuration, interfaces, or security of an organization. A robust ERP testing exercise can help an organization to meet its business objectives by optimizing costs.

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Why Application Security should be your top priority and what you can do about it?

Web or mobile applications are ruling our lives. From paying utility bills, playing games, and browsing on social media to booking movie and airline tickets and receiving news-feeds, applications are here to stay. According to statistics, the annual downloads of applications in the year 2020 is likely to touch 258 billion (Source: app-scoop.com). What does this imply? Our lives are going to be increasingly driven by digital applications. These bring in their wake attributes like convenience, ease of navigation, speedy delivery, and security, among others. However, the last one, ‘security’, has turned out to be a challenge of sorts with cyber threats growing incessantly.

Today, cyber threats have assumed menacing proportions with alarming consequences - for individuals, enterprises, and governments alike. These have evolved with advanced technologies and the propensity of users to remain indifferent. Cyber threats are just lurking behind the IT infrastructure waiting to exploit the built-in vulnerabilities. So, how does one remain vigilant and preempt such an eventuality? The answer lies in conducting a robust and time-bound application security testing. It ensures the timely detection of any vulnerability, breach, or risk, thereby allowing the organization to mitigate it.

It is not that only a certain size or kind of business becomes a victim of cybercrime. Everyone using the digital ecosystem is vulnerable. So, as we go about expanding our digital capabilities, we must also lay equal emphasis on strengthening the security framework. This can be done by conducting routine software application security testing in the SDLC. Further, as the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution slowly but steadily envelops the digital landscape, there is a concurrent increase in cybersecurity scare. The biggest challenge to have emerged is identifying the weak nodes among the billions of interconnected IoT devices.

Planning and running an application security testing exercise can have challenges (and vulnerabilities) such as:

l  Presence of threats like SQL injections and cross-site scripting

l  Lack of a proper strategy for application security testing

l  Not using the right dynamic application security testing tools

l  Inadequate tracking of the test progress

l  Reduced scope of testing due to the pressure of time and speed

l  Inability to build the right team and plan

l  Failure to adhere to the established security protocols

l  Absence of an application inventory. The same would have tracked expired SSL certificates, mobile APIs, and added domains, among others

How to build a robust application security testing methodology

The threat from hackers is real as enterprises have become wary of falling prey to their shenanigans. Statistically, cybercrime is expected to cost a global loss of around $6 trillion annually by 2021 (Source: Annual Cybercrime Report of Cybersecurity Ventures.) Also, hackers have been found to attack every 39 seconds or 2,244 times a day on an average as per a survey by the University of Maryland. Hence, web and mobile application security testing should be accorded the highest priority. Let us understand the process to build an effective strategy.

# Analyze the software development process: Many-a-times the processes drawn for building software can have gaps or weak links. These can bring a smile on the faces of hackers. Thus, testers should scrutinize or analyze the development cycle to identify the gaps or vulnerabilities.

# Create a threat model: Post analyzing the development process, prepare a threat model to understand the data flow through the application. This way, testers can identify the problem areas or defective locations in the process.

# Automate: The testing of applications comprises steps that are iterative in nature. These mundane tasks can tie human resources, which otherwise could have been used to execute other critical tasks. So, to improve efficiency and better identification of glitches, the testing process should be automated. By running automated test scripts, testers and developers can examine the source code to identify vulnerabilities. Thereafter, the same can be mitigated before actual deployment.

# Manual testing not to be dispensed with: Even though manual testing receives a lot of flak when it comes to the identification of errors, they can be effective as well. This is due to the fact that automated tools working on a script can miss certain errors that are not accounted for in the script. This is where manual testing can help by leveraging human expertise.

# Fixing metrics: The vulnerabilities in an application can only be ascertained when the features and functionalities are tested against a set of metrics. These help enterprises to focus on specific areas and improve risk management.

Conclusion

Cyber threats have emerged as key concerns for enterprises or organizations. They can have damaging consequences when it comes to factors like trust and customer experience. By undertaking static or dynamic application security testing, enterprises can address such issues and truly harness the benefits of an advanced digital ecosystem.

What are the best testing tools for 2020?

Digitalization, although a blessing in every sense of the word, can have its basket of thorns as well. This refers to the hacking activities using measures like phishing or introducing elements like ransomware, viruses, trojans, and malware. Globally, security breaches have caused an annual loss of $20.38 million in 2019 (Source: Statista.com). Also, cybercrime has led to a loss of 0.80% of the world’s GDP, which sums up to around $2.1 trillion in 2019 alone (Source: Cybriant.com).

With a greater number of enterprises and entities clambering onto the digital bandwagon, security considerations have taken a center stage. And since new technologies like AI/ML, IoT, and Big Data, are increasingly making inroads into our day-to-day lives, the risks associated with cybercrime are growing as well. Further, the use of web and mobile applications in transacting financial data has put the entire digital paraphernalia exposed to security breaches. The inherent vulnerabilities present in such applications can be exploited by cybercriminals to siphon off critical data including money.

To stem the rot and preempt adverse consequences of cybercrime, such as losing customer trust and brand reputation, security testing should be made mandatory. Besides executing application security testing, every software should be made compliant with global security protocols and regulations. These include ISO/IEC 27001 & 27002, RFC 2196, CISQ, NIST, ANSI/ISA, PCI, and GDPR.

Thus, in the Agile-DevSecOps driven software development cycle, security testing entails identifying and mitigating the vulnerabilities in a system. These may include SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), broken authentication, security misconfiguration, session management, Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) or failure to restrict URL access, among others. No wonder, penetration testing is accorded high priority when it comes to securing an application. So, to make the software foolproof against malicious codes or hackers, let us find out the best security testing tools for 2020.

What are the best security testing tools for 2020?

Any application security testing methodology shall entail the conduct of functional testing. This way, many vulnerabilities and security issues can be identified, which if not addressed in time can lead to hacking. The tool needed to conduct such testing can be both open-source and paid. Let us discuss them in detail.

·         Nessus: Used for vulnerability assessment and penetrating testing, this remote security scanning tool has been developed by Tenable Inc. While testing the software, especially on Windows and Unix systems, the tool raises an alert if it identifies any vulnerability. Initially available for free, Nessus is now a paid tool. Even though it costs around $2,190 per year, it remains one of the popular and highly effective scanners to check vulnerabilities. It employs a simple language aka Nessus Attack Scripting Language (NASL) to identify potential attacks and threats.

·         Burp Suite: When it comes to web application security testing, Burp Suite remains hugely popular. Developed by PortSwigger Web Security and written in Java, it offers an integrated penetrating testing platform to execute software security testing for web applications. The various tools within its overarching framework cover the entire testing process. These include tasks like mapping & analysis and finding security vulnerabilities.

·         Nmap: Also known as the Network Mapper, this is an open-source tool to conduct security auditing. Additionally, it can detect the live host and open ports on the network. Developed by Gordon Lyon, Nmap does its job of discovering host and services in a network by dispatching packets and analyzing responses. Network administrators use it to identify devices running in the network, discover hosts, and find open ports.

·         Metaspoilt: As one of the popular hacking and penetration testing tools, it can find vulnerabilities in a system easily. Owned by Rapid7, it can gain ingress into remote systems, identify latent security issues, and manage security assessments.

·         AppScan: Now owned by HCL and developed by the Rational Software division of IBM, AppScan is counted among the best security testing tools. As a dynamic analysis testing tool used for web application security testing, AppScan carries out automated scans of web applications.

·         Arachni: As a high-performing open source and modular web application security scanner framework, Arachni executes high-quality security testing. It identifies, classifies, and logs security issues besides uncovering vulnerabilities such as SQL and XSS injections, invalidated redirect, and local and remote file inclusion. Based on the Ruby framework, this modular tool can be instantly deployed and offers support for multiple platforms.

·         Grabber: Designed to scan web applications, personal websites, and forums, this light penetration testing tool is based on Python. With no GUI interface, Grabber can identify a range of vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting, AJAX and backup files verification, and SQL injection. This portable tool supports JS code analysis and can generate a stats analysis file.

·         Nogotofail: Developed by Google, this testing tool helps to verify the network traffic, detect misconfigurations and TLS/SSL vulnerabilities. The other vulnerabilities detected by Nogotofail are SSL injection, SSL certificate verification issues, and MiTM attacks. The best attributes of this tool include being lightweight and easy to deploy and use. It can be set up as a router, VPN server, or proxy.

·         SQL Map: This free-to-use security testing tool can support a range of SQL injection methodologies. These include Boolean-based blind, out-of-band, stacked queries, error-based, UNION query, and time-based blind. This open-source penetrating testing software detects vulnerabilities in an application by injecting malicious codes. Its robust detection engine helps by automating the process of identifying vulnerabilities related to SQL injections. The tool supports databases such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

Conclusion

Testing the security of applications or websites has become a critical requirement in the SDLC. This is due to the growing threats from cybercriminals who are adopting every possible means to hoodwink the security protocol or exploit the inherent vulnerabilities in a system. The only insurance against such a growing menace is to make security testing a responsibility for every stakeholder in the SDLC and beyond.