Quality Assurance (QA) is the stage of production during which all functionality and quality tests are performed. The objective is to validate the consistency of the deliverable with what has been defined in the contract and / or the specifications.
Quality Assurance must be present at all levels of a site’s development: from the beginning of the template integration to the final touches.
Here are the key elements of verification before delivery of a product:
- Website performance
- Visual
- Ergonomics
- SEO
Through these items (and many others – this list is not exhaustive), we can draw up a list of questions to check when setting up a site’s QA:
- Is the site correctly displayed and navigable?
- Is the site faithful to the models from a visual point of view?
- Is the research functional?
- Are the site’s functionalities (i.e. registration forms, member area) operational?
- Is the site well referenced?
To illustrate our remarks, here is an example of steps to check during a QA.
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The visual aspect – The site’s layout
It is essential to rely on the models approved by the client to validate the compliance of the site in terms of visual rendering. The dimensions, the different positions, the colors, and the fonts must be correctly represented on the website. Each element must correspond in every respect to what has been proposed and approved.
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The site’s functionalities
It is important that the functionality of the site be available according to what has been included in the service offer. It can be a contact form, a connected API, a sharing widget, and so on. Depending on the functionality, different tests will be performed: optimization, loading speed, etc.
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Mobility – the responsiveness
This is about determining how responsive the site is to different screen resolutions: mobile, tablet, and desktop. The site must use the space efficiently without breaking the functionality in each of the formats.
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The specificity of a Web application
When it comes to a web application, it is possible to add test cases to the validation processes. These allow to both guide the team during the validation and also to ensure that the final product meets the criteria of use established at the outset.
Effective quality control is always done through multiple members of the team. Each brings his expertise. The developer, for example, must make sure that he or she has done their own tests before submitting the site to the project manager, who will then do their own QA.
What steps to follow for an effective QA?
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Communicate
In order to be effective in QA steps, it is important to communicate and avoid repetition. For this, it is necessary to centralize information to make it easily accessible to the whole team.
It is very easy to waste time during Quality Assurance. If the same element is mentioned more than once in different ways and multiple developers are dealing with the same problem without knowing it, this will cause a conflict when synchronizing with the versioning tool.
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Archive
It is also necessary to keep an archive of what has been corrected and mentioned about a bug. By documenting the issues raised during the tests, it is possible to better understand why a problem was corrected in a certain way, and if the problem reappears later, it is possible to know in detail what was causing a bug and fix it faster.
For us, Quality is the key to access our Relative Market, full of potential customers we want to reach. This is what Digital Marketing is about too. As a Web Agency, this is what we have to keep in mind, always.
