Quality Assurance in Web Development

Ensuring that your website works efficiently should be a weekly routine for your business. Quality assurance is important to conduct frequently, as it's almost certain that broken functions will be discovered. It's vital you spot these snags, as they could be causing hindrance on your customers' ability to make a purchase or get in contact with your business, such as duplicate content or poor web design. In this blog, we will show you why website quality assurance is such a vital part of business operation, and why it's important to conduct quality assurance in web development.

In the most simple terms, quality control is a system or process designed to test a product or a service against its specification. QA, as it's often referred to, marries the optimising and development team to look over relevant devices and browsers to ensure everything is looking and running smoothly.

Quality assurance allows you to discover any flaws in your product or service and then act on those flaws to constantly make progress. The earlier you catch any issues, the cheaper it will be to fix them, and the less impact they will have on your business.

For our optimising team, web quality assurances ensure that the user experience is faultless. This involves looking over the site's quality to identify any 'conversion killers' or friction the user might run into. Quality assurance is very important to do before a website goes live, so any failure points can be ironed out before the site becomes available to real users, ensuring the consumer has the best user experience possible.

At Welford, website quality assurance is at the heart of our business operation; whether that be within the internal processes we undertake or client projects, we allocate a large amount of our time to maintain our expected standard.

When looking over a website during a website quality assurance check, there are certain elements to which you should pay extra attention. It's simple to think of this list as a checklist, ticking off each item before moving on to the next. This way, you can avoid flitting between tasks and stay focused. So, what are the most common aspects to check over?

Our process

The quality assurance checks for website development can differ from team to team, so some agencies might have different processes than others. However, as a starting point, these are the process steps that you should follow.

Functional and non-functional site analysis

Website quality assurance developers will run through the functional and non-functional website requirements, clarifying whether they are needed or not. You should look to ensure all requirements are clear and consistent throughout.

Planning stage

After the initial analysis, you should move on to the planning stage. You should draft a thorough plan including strategy, scope, budget, resources etc. for your web quality assurance check. Most importantly, draft up how you will report bugs and the procedures all team members should follow for organised interactions.

Designing stage

After your comprehensive plan has been implemented, quality assurance engineers will design test cases that cover the project requirements. These test cases help visualise the conditions and steps that will require checking should a particular website feature fail. This designing stage helps set you up for the following stage: testing.

Testing and bug reporting

Everything has been designed thus far to be tested, and so now, the website quality assurance team will execute the designed cases to track bugs. Bugs will be listed as per the procedure process outlined in stage 2.

Re-testing

After the bugs have been fixed and the snags have been looked over, web quality assurance engineers will run the testing one last time to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Sometimes, fixing bugs can cause a multitude of problems within itself!

All the steps are listed, and all procedures have been outlined, but how can you effectively manage your website quality assurance team?

In the beginning, there's no limit to how frequently you should conduct assurance checks. Go wild with it – the more checks you make, the smoother your website will run! Ideally, you should gradually increase the time between your web quality assurance checks. Start by conducting them weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly. After each feature is added to the site or a major update is installed, be sure to conduct a quality assurance test to ensure there are no snags.

Both user testing and quality assurance testing are extremely important when testing a software or website. Although they work in slightly different ways and capacities, they are both imperative to a quality end result.

When conducting quality assurance checks in web development, you are simply looking for errors within the software that would prevent the website from running swimmingly. User testing, however, focuses more on user experience. When conducting user testing, the website is tested in terms of user accessibility, experience, functionality and usability from a user point of view. Both website quality assurance checks and user testing checks work hand in hand to provide a website or software of excellent quality. The main benefit of conducting both is that you can be certain the end result is of tip-top quality.

If you don't already have a dedicated member of your team running quality assurance checks, then you're missing out! Performing website quality assurance checks frequently is imperative to a well-oiled piece of software or website. Never fear, we can help you! Contact a team member today to discuss how we can help with your web quality assurance needs. Alternatively, check out the other services we offer within bespoke website development and design.