Testing of a website, our best practicies for testing before deployment

Testing is not random clicking

Testing a website or an app before it’s launch is like a rehearsal before the show. This is like the last wardrobe fitting before the gala. After that point, the only thing left is the performance itself. The final results will be judged by the audience. In the case of white label WordPress development projects, it means the customers using the website or system.

Best testing practices

At WLC we use the 5-stage process of testing our work. It ensures that the minimum number of fixes will return to us after the user acceptance tests. All of them are performed by the cooperating agency with their client. It also lets us ensure our work is following the highest standards. It applies to to the speed, security and compliance with current web standards.

Supervising code

Regular code review done by a fellow developer is part of our routine. You might think there is only one person working on your project. In fact there will always be a second pair of eyes. These eyes are looking at the code we’ve produced. It ensures all good practices have been followed, and no obvious mistakes have been done.

In addition to code review, the team holds short meetings daily. During such a meeting programmers can share experiences, explore challenges and offer feedback. In this way, the team benefits from a group’s body of knowledge and experiences. While it is not exactly about the testing, it is part of our Quality Assurance framework. This allows for projects to receive the optimal solution to each challenge. Daily meetings gives us greater confidence that the pieces of code contributed from each member of the team will synchronize as seamlessly as possible (in case of a larger team working on a single project).

How do we do manual testing for a website?

Once the development of a page or feature is accomplished, our QA team goes through manual testing. This helps to determine that the software coded by developer complies with customer expectations. We have to provide a product with agreed scope of functionality and the design.

To understand exactly how the software should function, testers refer to the project documentation. It includes user stories and the testing scenarios based on that narrative. Both the number and size of these scenarios are dependent on the size of the project.

The final look and behaviour of the website are also carefully compared with the designs. If that was agreed in the order we ared doing it in a pixel-perfect manner. It covers both the desktop and mobile platforms.

Test scenarios are also useful in case of larger projects requiring long term maintenance. Each update or change bears a risk of introducing a bug in an unexpected place of the system. Tests are designed to cover all the paths critical from the business perspective. Executing them as a part of the deployment process ensures the page or system works correctly. Before starting, we check all changes made and make sure that we have solved all potential problems.

At WLC, the approach to testing is very structured. It requires an insightful and methodical approach which utilizes procedures. Checklist and relevant experience of our QA specialists, making it an integral part of the project.

The person testing the project is informed by the developer or product owner of the need to test. This comes in the form of task, which is described on a Kanban board (our team extensively uses Jira). This is usually associated with the completion of the stage or module.

During the white label WordPress development, we test each project carefully until we resolve all errors reported by the tester. After the reported errors are corrected, relative functionalities are also tested, to be completely thorough. If any error continues to occur, the iteration is systematically repeated until it’s addressed.

Before passing the complete project for user acceptance tests, we go through the site optimization procedure. We have to to ensure all the necessary measures have been taken to make the website fast, secure and compliant with web standards. We use several external tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to test the website.

Summary

In a process of testing each customer’s product before its launch, any errors or issues can be identified and corrected. Our team of specialists performs these activities for every customer’s project in an efficient and consistent way. It is possible thanks to the defined procedures for testing, continuously improved on the base of our ongoing experiences. Our team is familiar with programming standards and up to date good practices too. Constant training which is part of our work culture.

This all we do to ensure that the quality of work we provide. The overall experience of working with our team is similar, or even surpasses to having your in-house team.