Timeshifting Interactive Blog
The importance of QA, or making sure the thing actually works
Website testing or quality assurance seems to all too often get overlooked. At the very least basic cross browser testing should be done, and it’s surprising how often issues here can sneak through, and not always those you’d expect. The most common case is the ‘web designer’ with little front-end knowledge creating a site that only works in Internet Explorer, though a similar case is developers who work in Firefox or Safari making sites that work fine in those browsers but have weird glitches in IE. However, cross browser is just the start.
For sites with user accounts every page should be tested with logged in and logged out states, do parts of the UI change between the two? Does the layout look weird or broken with elements added or removed? Does an Internet Explorer rendering bug occur on interaction? Then let’s add Ajax into the mix. When you start to consider these cases, it’s easy to see why you need solid QA plan and that allowing 20% of the development budget isn’t unreasonable, especially on iterative designs.
So are you sure your site actually works in all cases? If not it might be time to reassess your QA strategy.