Quality Control is a non-removable part of your website development project. One cannot deliver a website to the client without having it go through a Quality Control or Quality Assurance step. QC is placed at the post-development and pre-delivery stage that ensures that the product i.e. the website developed adheres to the guidelines set before commencing the project.

The quality of your delivered product speaks a lot of your working procedures, chances of getting new clients and retaining the current ones. Without QC, you will be missing your custom satisfaction targets. In this blog, I take the battle to Computan’s QC department question by question.

What is the goal of testing a website? What does the QC department do when they have tasked with QCing a website?

"In any computer program testing approach, the objective is to guarantee the rightness of the website for the end-users who use it.


There are two key stages of QC:

(I) During the development of the website
(II) After a website is propelled (its production)

As QA engineers, we check the requirements and scope of the website where QC is required. We would like to be sure that the website is looking reliable in terms of design. The critical thing to consider are; pictures, headers, or standards that are not optimized. Most individuals don’t know how critical a single second of the website loading time is. The normal visitor isn't planning to hold up more than 3 to 5 seconds for your site to load. This may sound like a misrepresentation, but that's how restless website visitors can be. This is why you wish to optimize your page sizes as much as possible.

Some more things that need to be checked:

  • Navigation should be intuitive and easyCheck browser compatibility
  • Link validation
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Forms"

- Farhan Arshad, Software Quality Assurance Engineer, Computan


"Website Quality Control (QC) is about making sure your site is working as expected. With regular quality control inspection in place, we can know of the broken links and issues on the website (and therefore can be fixed, preventing lost opportunities from users who couldn't access what they were looking for) and another main purpose is to make website user friendly. Because it's all about customer satisfaction while visiting the developed website, there are multiple approaches to QC a site, but the main and core process of QCing any site is to ensure the Quality of work including UI and Functionality."

-Asif Mahmood, QC Team Lead, Computan

 

"Website testing is a testing process meant to identify errors in a website, web micro-service, or any other web-based application. During this phase, website testers evaluate different components of the website and examine each feature, both individually and collectively. The testing procedure is extremely thorough, and QA web testers check the entire web system end-to-end before releasing the website for use. As a result, they can evaluate how well the website fulfills its purpose.

Step 1: Make an inventory of things to inspect
Step 2: Make a schedule
Step 3: Test

Common Tests:

  • Check every link on your website
  • Review organic search listings
  • Review error logs
  • Review crawl errors
  • Test contact information
  • Test in various web browsers and devices
  • Validate code
  • Spell check
  • Test Accessibility"

- Ahmar, Akram, Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, Computan

How do QC guys go about their work? What tools do they use?

"QC person firstly gets the scope of any task to start work on, then takes all the other details in hand including designs, tools to report a bug, and start processing on what needs testing. And, they use multiple tools for testing

  • Jmeter, Katallon, Project Strategy - Microsoft Word.
  • Project/Sprint Planning - Jira
  • Communication - Slack, Microsoft Teams, Yammer
  • Document Repository - SharePoint
  • Test Repository & Defect Management - JIRA.
  • Automation Tools - Jenkins, Selenium, Cucumber, Java.
  • Github and many more"

- Asif Mahmood, QC Team Lead, Computan

 

There are many commercial and open-source tools we currently use for testing a website but it also depends on the project requirements.

  • For functional testing: We use Selenium Webdriver.
  • Postman: This is a lightweight API testing tool that we use for quick answers during the testing phase.
  • Multi-Device Testing (BrowserStack): Mobile apps span across multiple device OS versions and multiple screen resolutions, making the QA cycle difficult. The purchasing range of real devices to test on becomes impractical and time-consuming as well so that for testing a website on different devices we use ‘BrowserStack’ where we can easily use multiple devices for checking resolution.
  • Jmeter: We use Jmeter as a load testing tool for analyzing and measuring the performance of a variety of services, with a focus on web applications.


- Farhan Arshad, Software Quality Assurance Engineer, Computan


"QC guys analyze the requirements and goals, prepare a query list based on the set requirements and goals. Then they prepare the test cases which they will execute later and check for performance problems on multiple devices and browsers. Then the QC person prepares a detailed report on the findings and lists improvements.

Required Tools:

  • Test management tools: Azure DevOps, Xcode, Android Studio, Charles, Dev Console, Fiddler, etc
  • Project management tools: Jira, Trello, Confluence, Jenkins, GitHub, etc
  • Communication tools: Slack, Skype, Zoom, etc
  • Functional testing tools: Popular Functional testing tools are Selenium & Cucumber
  • API testing tools like Postman
  • Unit testing tools like JUnit, NUnit, PHPUnit, etc
  • Multi-browser testing tools like Browser-stack & Sauce-labs
  • Multi-device testing tools like Device Emulators"

- Ahmar, Akram, Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, Computan

Where might QC engineers not notice bugs that designers do? Where might QC engineers see bugs that designers won't?

"The full team consists of a project manager, designer, developers, DevOps, and QA – of course, it may happen that the teams do not have all the groups, but a “set” like this allows for efficient development of high-quality software. Everyone has their role in the team, a QA person focuses on multiple things like functionality, UI, load testing, stress testing, Data validation, and more. And, the designer only focuses on static page design layout/UI things. That's why sometimes some UI issues are missed by the QA person because he/she tests multiple things at a time and the designer catches the error because of having expertise in that area. But the same can happen with designers as well. Designers make the design on one static screen and are not sure what this design will exactly look like on all screens. So, sometimes things break and are caught by the QA person."

- Asif Mahmood, QC Team Lead, Computan

 

"The QA person tests the whole project including functional testing, stress, load, and UI. On the other side, the designers are experts to make a design perfect according to the requirements. There are many functional and back-end issues that are unknown to a designer but known to the QA person. QC team uses different tools and techniques for finding out the back-end issues."

- Farhan Arshad, Software Quality Assurance Engineer, Computan

What can you learn from a QC bug report about a developer?

"By going through a bug report we can know that how efficient and clean work/project made by him/her."

- Asif Mahmood, QC Team Lead, Computan

"Because of the fast-paced work style, sometimes miscommunication and misunderstanding lead to different problems regarding issue reporting, so a QC should describe the issue in a complete sense and the developer should also understand the scenario rather than trying to justify things. It should be a smooth process."

- Ahmar, Akram, Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, Computan

One shouldn’t jump the gun about judging the developer after viewing the bug report once. There can be many factors involved that might lead to incorrect reporting or misunderstanding about the errors. That being said, you can’t blame the QC team unless you know for a fact that they didn’t know the requirements or goals of the project. Only stronger communication and deep understanding among team members can eliminate false judgments on the skills of other team members. QC team and the development team must adhere to the common requirements and goals and follow that like a guiding document.