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What is Quality Assurance for Developers?

What does Quality Assurance mean when it comes to developers?

According to our experience, the best solution is to carry out your QA as you develop a website. This avoids both a big test period and a bottleneck at the end of the project. It’s also a great way to meet deadlines.

Another important advantage is that we can isolate blocks or modules that we test but already know to be robust.

Here is a small example to illustrate our observations.

When we build the “master layout” of a website, we start with the “header” and make sure it works properly for the 3 main screen resolutions.

Once the header is functional, we move on to another task, such as creating the “footer” for example.

Finally, once all the elements of the “master layout” are finalized and tested individually, we perform general tests on all the modules.

At GTI, formerly MultipleMedia, to monitor our quality assurance process, we chose to use Mantis Bug Tracker.

It is a flexible tool that offers us different possibilities:

  • Create users with different roles
  • Organize the structure of the projects being tested
  • Plan our test time ranges
  • Give access to our customers so that they can enter bugs or requests for adjustments.

Test Environments

To ensure that nothing passes through our quality assurance process, it is necessary to perform tests on different platforms and devices. Initial developer testing is often done in a local environment.

Once these are done, the code is sent to a server dedicated to development. The features being built are then tested in different scenarios. This development server has a similar configuration to the production server, but technically makes it easier to identify potential problems.

Subsequently, when the changes are ready to be presented to the client, the code is sent to a pre-production server, also known as a “stage”. The configuration in this environment is identical to the production environment.

Once the pre-production site is approved by the customer, it is sent to the production server, which is available to the public. Upon installation, the site is tested with search engines, speed analysis, and optimization tools and social networks.

Creating a Post-Deployment Checklist

After the resolution of the bugs, it is interesting to create a checklist of points to verify on the website to finalize everything.

Examples of verification elements:

  • Page 404 included and correct display,
  • Indexing in active search engines (in case of a WordPress site)
  • Cleaned and optimized source code (i.e. minification of files),
  • Preferred icon included and generated according to the different platforms, etc.

Testing the website on physical media offers a better guarantee than software emulators. For example, they can be combined with tests performed using the compatibility or emulation option of mobile versions.

In order to guide you in your checklist, and to recap this article, here are the steps to follow for an effective QA:

  1. Verification of Master Layout and Static HTML Pages Templates
  2. QA of the content that the customer has entered and verification of the features
  3. Validation of the conformity of what has already been tested

The sections to check so you do not miss anything:

  • Speed ​​/ Performance
  • Features
  • Visual / Design / Layout
  • SEO

And because we think of everything at MultipleMedia, we have also prepared a small list of practical tools for testing a website:

Chrome Developer Tools: https://developer.chrome.com/devtools provides access to the console, simulate resolutions, check loading time, …

BrowserStack https://www.browserstack.com  allows the site to be consulted on different platforms and / or browsers, and to ensure optimal rendering on mobile.

Google Page Insights https: //developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/  a tool developed by Google that verifies optimization and performance and provides leads to improve loading speed.

We, as a Digital Agency, devote ourself to the Highest Quality Level for our customers.

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