Cookie is to be known as text a file that gets saved in the hard disk of the user’s system. Browsers are required to use the cookies which have been saved in the desired location. Informative data is recorded in the cookie and that can be retrieved for the web pages.
The first test case is to test if your application is writing cookies properly on disk. You can use the Cookie Tester application also if you don’t have any web application to test but you want to understand the cookie concept for testing.
Test cases:
1) As per the 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, you must make sure that the data stored in a cookie is stored in an 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) Verify that If you are using cookies on your site, your sites major functionality will not work by disabling the cookies. 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) Verify that on Disabling the cookies appropriate messages Should be displayed to user like “For smooth functioning of this site make sure that cookies are enabled on your browser” while navigate through Site.
6) Verify that there should not be any page crash due to disabling the cookies.
Note:Please make sure that you close all browsers, delete all previously written cookies before performing this test)
7) Verify that 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 Major used browsers like Internet explorer (Various versions), Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera etc.
8) Verify that cookies written by one domain can not accessed by another browser.
9) Verify that Corrupted cookies can not be accessible by other domain.
Note: Corrupting cookie is easy. You know where cookies are stored. Manually edit the cookie in notepad and change the parameters to some vague values. Like alter the cookie content, Name of the cookie or expiry date of the cookie and see the site functionality. In some cases corrupted cookies allow to read the data inside it for any other domain. This should not happen in case of your web site cookies.
10) Accepts/Reject some cookies: The best way to check web site functionality is, not to 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 major functionality of web site. See if pages are getting crashed or data is getting corrupted.
11) 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.
12) Checking the deletion of cookies from your web application page: Some times cookie written by domain say rediff.com may be deleted by same domain but by 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 user the cookie written on disk get deleted to avoid multiple action logging from same cookie. Check if reaching to your action or purchase page deletes the cookie properly and no more invalid actions or purchase get logged from same user.
13) 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 says if previous user ID is 456 then make it 452 and press enter. The proper access message should be displayed to user and user should not be able to see other users account.
14) In case of online shopping portal testing ,Verified that when user reach to final order summary page,cookie of previous page i.e. shopping cart page should be deleted properly.
15) Verified that credit card number should not be stored in cookies not even in encrypted form.
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 scenario, you can mention your test cases in comments below.
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