If your site was created several years ago, it could be said with a high degree of certainty that the developers did not conduct QA and QC testing before handing it over to the customer. In this article, we will review the goals and objectives of QA/QC testing.
What is QA/QC testing, and why is it so important?
Mandatory Quality Assurance and Quality Control research of any IT developments – from applications to websites – has only recently become an integral component of any technological processes in this technological area.
Foremost, defining these two parts of the much-needed process of checking a development product for errors and bottlenecks is necessary. Since in this article we are focusing on website testing, let’s narrow down our understanding of these approaches:
- QA (Quality Assurance) testing is a set of actions to check all site metrics at each stage of its development.
- QC (Quality Control) is an integral part of QA, which is an analysis of the compliance of a ready-for-use site with the set requirements for performance and efficiency. QA and QC testing is necessary for the successful functioning of any web resource.
- The purpose of QA/QC testing is deep research of the actual performance of the site and its compliance with the set requirements.
Today, conscientious developers, such as experts from SECL, test the developed site before handing it over to the customer. However, even if your site was not thoroughly researched at the start, nothing prevents you from conducting such testing now and fixing any problems found. Here are some sure signs that your web resource is in dire need of QA testing:
- Pages take too long to load
- Error messages appear regularly
- The site does not display correctly in browsers
- The website is poorly processed by search robots and does not appear on the first pages of Google.
- The website does not provide the necessary conversion
- Although the site has all the required web forms, you do not receive active feedback.
It goes without saying that QA/QC testing, conducted by experienced professionals, corrects the causes of these and other similar problems and provides all elements of the website – from code to design – with the necessary high work quality and, therefore, guarantees proper conversion of the resource.
What are the QA/QC testing stages, and how is it carried out?
The most common areas of site inspection during QA/QC testing are as follows:
- Design Testing: Checking if the site design matches what the client wanted.
- Functional testing: checking all functionality on the site’s correct operation.
- Requirements testing: verification of the site’s compliance with the requirements agreed upon at the beginning of cooperation.
- Compatibility testing involves testing tools to check if your site works with various browsers and mobile devices.
- Security testing: checking the site for vulnerabilities or other security issues.
Ideally, the testing should be done in advance, even before the site is open for free access. In that case, it allows you to avoid many annoying technical problems and keep the reputation of your brand in check and even save money. After all, QA/QC testing, in this case, solves the following complex problems:
- Confirms the reputation of your brand. Preventing the release of a low-quality product to the general public protects your company from reputational risks.
- Detects severe problems from the start. You offer consumers a perfect product by timely finding and removing obstacles that could prevent your site from working as planned. This way, you can be sure they will not leave your site because of its inconveniences. As a result, the probability that they will reach the point of performing the targeted action increases dramatically.
- Helps to create a reliable site. Identifying and correcting errors during the testing phase means that you already have a perfectly working product. You will not have to interrupt its operation to make further code corrections or eliminate UI/UX design errors.
- Saves your money. It is often more expensive to rework a faulty site than to build a new product. In addition, a web resource that does not meet the requirements of search engines can literally collapse your network rating and block your way to the first pages of search results for a long time.
- Increases usability. An intuitive interface can either keep a visitor on the site for a long time or immediately turn him away from your resource and your company for a long time, if not forever.
How often does a website require QA testing?
The quality control process depends on the size of your site and its complexity. The only recommendation for all website owners is to perform website quality control regularly.
This will help to notice and timely remove even the most minor errors. Moreover, in the process of such an audit, you could find out the roughness of the UI/UX interface and fix them before it turns into a real problem.
Ensuring website quality is like disease prevention. QA allows you to detect errors at the initial stages and quickly correct them without harmful consequences and losses.
Test your website to improve its performance, and find and fix any errors. Don’t delude yourself: errors will always exist. The question is just how harmful they are and how quickly you will see and get rid of them.
Don’t forget about safety!
One of the critical points of QA/QC testing is to check your site for vulnerabilities. To do this, experienced engineers turn into hackers for a while and try to harm it using procedures known among network intruders. In addition, special scripts scan the structure of your site for errors that could serve as loopholes for viruses and trojans. The importance of such an audit cannot be overestimated. Indeed, most often, the goal of hackers is not to disable your web resource but to use it as a tool for their own benefit. Your site, for example, can be turned into a zombie that will infect your visitors, turning their computers into cryptocurrency mining farms. There are an incredible number of ways to harm you. Therefore, QA/QC testing can save you from such serious problems, the scale of which you can’t even imagine.
Summing up
Your site is not a frozen block, but a constantly changing resource. The more attention you pay to its performance and security, the more profit it will provide to your business.
