Quality Assurance Testing
From our perspective, quality assurance is a subset of the overall usability goal—after all, a website isn’t usable if it isn’t working.
Quality assurance is an important step in the website development process and, by all means, must not be skipped. A broken link or a misspelled word may seem like trivial mistakes, but they can greatly undermine the credibility of your website. You want people who visit your site to feel confident about the quality of the information they find.
Your company should come up with its own set of guidelines to follow while conducting quality assurance testing. The guidelines should address editorial, graphics, and coding conventions. After the site has been built, it should be put through a rigorous post-production process. Finally, there should be a provision for user feedback, which can influence the ongoing maintenance of the site.
Some areas to cover in your own quality assurance checklist include:
Content
Documentation
Browser compatibility
User preference compatibility
Do it do what it is supposed to do? is usability an issue? have you had it tested against stringent best practice guidelines? have you used any online tools?
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