The Ultimate Testing Checklist

by Shirley Kaiser. Excerpted from the book Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists

Testing plays a critical role in the development of your web site and its long-term maintenance. While smaller web sites - especially those with more limited budgets-may not need to follow the formal testing procedures that are required for large-scale, commercial web sites, every site needs to be thoroughly tested to ensure that it's error-free, user-friendly, accessible , and standards compliant.

Testing should be completed during each phase of a site's development. Two of the most costly web project mistakes are to delay testing until just before launch, or not to test at all. Testing during production makes it easier to locate and resolve errors, and minimizes the chance of existing bugs being replicated throughout later stages of development. Early and continued testing can eliminate the need for the costly redesigns and other major fixes that can result from overlooked errors.

This chapter's checklists, extracted from SitePoint's new release, Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists, will help you test your site both during development, and after. Download this checklist, along with others covering SEO and content management - you'll also receive .pdf versions of the documents for immediate use in your web projects.

Getting Started

Document your baseline web site testing requirements

Make use of the preliminary data you collected in Chapter 2 to help determine and document your baseline site testing requirements. For instance, the information you collected on the browsers and connection speeds that your visitors will use, and those visitors' skills and age groups, can be used as a basis for your testing plan.

Source and install all necessary tools

You can conduct tests very cheaply using free and low-cost testing tools. Most browsers are free or offer conditionally free versions, and you can download and install multiple browsers-including several versions of Internet Explorer for Windows-on one computer. Alternative device simulators and emulators, such as those for cell phones and PDAs, can also be downloaded and used for free, and most shareware and commercial software creators allow a 30-day trial of their products for testing purposes. Some web design-related discussion lists, as well as the SitePoint Forums, welcome testing requests and posts that solicit bug reports and feedback.

Provide acceptable testing protocols

Ultimately, the design and layout for each page of the site must be both aesthetically pleasing and functionalacross multiple platforms and browsers.

One of the difficulties associated with testing design elements on different platforms is that the test results can be subjective. For example, a designer may create a CSS -driven site that works perfectly on newer browsers, but doesn't look that hot in older browsers such as Netscape 4. The tester may interpret this as a failure point rather than acceptable "design degradation".

To avoid the time and effort involved in re-submitting pages for testing, spell out acceptable cross-browser, cross-platform differences in advance - including protocols for supporting old browsers.

Use Annotated Screenshots to Determine Display Protocols
At the end of the final prototyping stage, ask the designer to provide a series of screenshots that have been annotated to identify the differences in the ways the site displays on different browsers and platforms. These screenshots can be used in later testing to identify the displays that are deemed acceptable on each platform. Testers can then compare the protocols and screenshots with their findings.