A Little QA is Better Than No QA

You know that quality assurance testing your online business website is important or you could run the risk of losing customers and therefore sales as well.  But, you don’t have the time to perform a full suite of tests.  What do you do? You can execute high-level QA testing to ensure, that at the very least, that the major functionality works on your website.

This can also be referred to as enterprise testing. You are looking for major things that stand out immediately when using your site. Specific field functionality is not a goal in high-end QA because it is considered part of low-level or unit testing.

End-to-End Flow

When testing End-to-End flow, you decide the various “paths” or ways that a customer may take through your website from start to finish and execute them.  Entering an order may be one way or path to use your website.  First, launch your home page, choose to enter a new order, select purchase, enter your information and submit the order, and the confirmation page is displayed. You have just executed a high-level test to ensure that your customers can successfully enter an online order with your business.

Broken Links

It is very frustrating for a customer to want to use a link on your site and find out it does not work.  You want to make sure that all your links work.  Also, validate that the link will take to the appropriate destination site and not somewhere else.

Duplicate Content

Read through your Web site and remove any duplicate information. It may appear as if you did not proofread your content or you ran out of things to say and wanted it to be more than what it was.  Read through your Web site and remove any duplicate information. This could have an additional benefit because it may help improve your search engine rankings. Some search engines, such as Google, may penalize sites with duplicate content.

Use Other Browsers

Not all browsers display the same way. Your e-commerce website may look awesome in Internet Explorer® but unattractive in Firefox®. It is a good idea to test in multiple browsers to see how your site looks.  There are many browsers that can be used by customers.  It is hard to determine which browser your customers are using and do not want to lose a potential sales because your e-commerce site does not work with their browser. Some examples of browsers to try are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari.  

Are there resolutions below 1280 x 1024?

The higher the resolution, the better tings look on the screen. But, not everyone uses the higher resolution since it also makes things smaller. View your Web site at various resolutions to see how it looks. It is up to you to determine if changes are needed to make your site more attractive at the lower resolutions.

End-to-end flows, checking your links, reviewing your content and viewing your website in various ways are good high-end QA testing efforts. If time allows, it is recommended that you perform more lower-end testing.  High-end quality assurance testing may not check if a customer can enter an invalid state name or not, but it will ensure that a customer can use your online business Web site as it was intended for – making sales.

About the Author:

Jen Mercer is a Quality Assurance Engineer with Network Solutions