Skip to content

DIY Quality Assurance Checklist For Your Web Application – A QA Testing Guide For Business Owners

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes

Get complete access to an easy to use Quality Assurance Testing Checklist that guarantees
quick and easy hacks on how to test your web application – all by yourself.

Use this guide and steps to keep track of your development team and avoid irreversible errors.

Product Quality is one of the most important factors for the web world that businesses demand on priority to achieve success. This is where Quality Assurance Testing comes into play. Today, QA for web Testing is THE most important step in the web application development lifecycle, that decides how your app is perceived by your end-users. Website quality assurance includes quality testing in all areas of development such as documentation, coding, design, user experience and database management. Hence it is most important as a business owner to understand its importance. 

This guide here will give you a wonderful step by step breakdown of how you can do web application testing all by yourself, without needing a testing team. 

This article will answer one of the most asked questions on software quality assurance testing

How to test your app to make sure it’s built of highest quality?

In this detailed article, you’ll get some sureshot ways of how to test website ON YOUR OWN, when you don’t staff testing engineers at your end. 

If you’re looking for the proven hacks to test your website or web application, below explained website QA checklist is the step by step process which you can use all by yourself.

Most of us have faced situations where your product is completing development but is actually nowhere near to that final outcome you expected!

You see the application functioning pretty good but sometimes it breaks, or it is difficult to navigate at certain areas or its nearly impossible to upload that product database from the admin panel.

It’s frustrating and hard, and we know it…

You do not know where to start from and you feel stuck. The only thing you have in hand is a website full of errors that need to be tested again on all the quality parameters. 

Fret not, 

I have a brilliant solution for your problem – Web Quality Assurance Checklist

 

Quality Testing Checklist

 

 

It’s a step-by-step process that you can follow to prolifically achieve a quality-desired product. You can also download the website testing checklist here

But I’ll advise you to continue reading this article so you can understand technically what quality assurance website testing is and how you can do it easily. This blog explains how to test your site or app yourself using the checklist.

 

What is QA Testing & How Important is it for you?

Types of QA Testing and the ones which you can use at your end

How do development teams test for quality (quality testing process with image)

Things I can test at my end (tools to use, methods of testing)

How to keep track of the development team for quality during module development/during each phase of development

Finally a checklist that i can use at my end that will make me a pro in making sure my app is of high quality

 

 
Let’s start by understanding website quality assurance testing and its types & how you can use this information to assure your product is built of high quality!

What is QA testing and how important is it for your product success?

Quality assurance is an important step in the software development lifecycle that ensures users get a fast, seamless and bug free user experience when interacting with your software, web app or mobile app.

Website quality assurance is a crucial step before the final product launch. 

It leaves a strong impact on users and the business itself. Why? 

Because when a web application serves prolifically to its users, the chances of its usage are higher; ensuring great business revenues. 

That’s why QA can’t be overlooked. 

Some of the issues you normally face at the beta stages are: 

  • A long list of bugs in each module 
  • Features matching your requirements
  • App breakage and page loading issues
  • Cross-browser website accessibility issues
  • Cross-device functionality issues
  • Website responsiveness issues
  • Third party integration functioning issues
  • Data security issues
  • Performance issues
  • Interface usability issues
  • Page redirection issues
  • Form validation issues
  • Content Mistakes

These issues can be easily avoided if quality assurance testing is being performed both by the development company and yourself.

The errors overlooked during product development can cost much higher to fix.

To evaluate the facts clearly, you can check the info gathered by Systems Science Institutes at IBM where the hardware and software expert Mukesh Soni explained –

“The cost to fix an error found after product release was 4 to 5 times more than one uncovered during design, and up to 100 times more than one identified in the maintenance phase”

As far as the website quality is concerned, it’s mandatory to find and fix the bugs as early as possible to avoid further run-time product issues. 

This guide will teach you how to test at your end to avoid the above issues by following the step-by-step quality assurance website testing checklist.

 
Let’s start by understanding the types of web application testing and the ones that you can conveniently implement at your end to test website or web application.

Types of QA Testing and the ones which you can use at your end 

There are 5 top testing types which you need to know about. 

Some of them are pretty technical and some of them can be done by you with a little extra effort. Here I have explained each quality testing type and the ones which you can put into effect at your end.

  1. Functionality Testing 
  2. Performance  Testing 
  3. Automated Testing 
  4. Usability Testing
  5. Security Testing 

 

#1 Functional Testing

Website functionality testing is the most straightforward and essential type of web application testing which is done to check if all the product’s components perform as intended. 

See how functional testing works –

 

Functional Testing

 

Software testing engineers use the information they gathered at the initial phase of requirement analysis as their test cases to test a website. It helps them check whether the project is running as expected or not. 

Usually, functional testing is carried out to verify the workflows and user interface. It also involves testing the stored database for better and synchronized connectivity. 

By going a bit deeper you’ll get to know, measuring the functionality of a web application majorly rely on White Box and Black Box testing. This helps testing engineers review all the integrated components of a product for its quality check.

Black Box Testing: This type of functional testing lets check the software functionality without giving importance to the internal code. 

White Box Testing: On the contrary, White Box is referred to as “glass box testing” which verifies the internal code, internal design and data structure to deeply analyze product’s quality levels. 

Generally, both functional testing practices are used by software engineers to make the product quality-approved before launch. 

They use White Box website quality assurance testing techniques during the development phase so that all the major changes can be done then and there. 

On the other hand, Black Box testing is picked later as it is considered effective at the time of final product testing.

#2 Performance Testing

Performance testing is also the most crucial part of the website quality assurance testing checklist. The purpose of performance testing is clear, it tests system for stability and scalability under different load conditions. It also figures out the potential web bottlenecks to check the website’s structure and operations under high stress.

Being one of the most important web application testing scenarios, performance ensures that the system is high in performance and behaves correspondingly when utilized by the users.  

Organizations typically prepare and follow performance web testing checklist to evaluate the product’s processing speed, workload speed, efficiency and data transfer rates. Measuring these performance factors are helpful to know about the weak links integrated into the software. 

Performance testing can be deep tested by conducting load and stress testing. This can be calibrated by evaluating the below checkpoints.

Web Load Testing 

  • Determine if the application is running seamlessly under variegated Internet speed.
  • Check how the system behaves under normal and peak loads.
  • Check if the system is still running quite efficiently even if multiple users access it at the same time.
  • Inspect if the web application is ready to handle simultaneous user commands for DB access on specific pages.  

Web Stress Testing 

  • Check how the system reacts and responds to the stressed conditions where the system is being used beyond limits. 
  • Check if the website is ready to bear continuous load.
  • Check the performance metrics of memory, CPU and file handling operations.

#3 Automated Testing

Automated quality assurance website testing came into the picture when software engineers and testers started facing issues with manual testing practices. They find manual testing expensive and time-consuming that often fails to identify and fix potential bugs in software. 

Traditional manual testing requires a skilled team of testers who manually check each button and functional component to assess what’s working fine and which component needs to be fixed. 

But in the Automated QA for web testing, all can be done in more accurate, quicker and easier ways. The reason why automated testing is highly appreciated is due to the highly specialized code programs written by skilled programmers to check the severe vulnerabilities of the finalized software.

Due to the fast-paced problem-solving practice and accuracy in results, this technique is being widely adopted by tech organizations to make their products quality-assured. The best part is technology industry has provided various automation testing tools to make this task much faster and accurate.

 

Automation Testing

 

#4 Usability Testing

In a web application, user interface and user experience both need to be significantly considered during the development and testing phase. 

Another reason for this is the increasing modernity in consumers that demands beautiful and flawless websites all across the web. 

Here, following user interface testing checklist is a great option to check the quality level of your web application. 

Usability testing is the second most crucial phase of the website testing checklist where human and computer interaction factors of a system are measured and loopholes are identified for further correction.

 

Usability Testing

 

Process of Usability Testing:

  • The process typically involves selecting and inviting random customers for the usability test of a web application. 
  • Here, the development team is responsible for monitoring the user screen to know how the selected customers are interacting with the website. 
  • The team observes and notes down the frustrating points according to users and correct them to bring quality improvements in the product.
  • Finally, they figure out the broken pathways and complicated navigation process that make the web application complex to be used by users. 

Usability testing can be strengthened by taking expert reviews to know if they have something exceptional that can uplift the product and improve quality as well. This rigorous usability test helps find hidden vulnerabilities and also provides the possible ways to correct or improve them

#5 Security Testing

Security directly pitches data privacy that necessarily needs to be maintained in all phases of software development. No matter how much secure your product is, malicious elements find smart ways to harm it through brutal hacking attacks. 

If you test your product for the security parameters, your product will automatically gain traction across the web. The application security testing checklist that software testers follow to measure the security levels are given below.

Generic System Testing 

Here, they conduct security testing to –

  • Check if the web page contains important data like passwords, credit card numbers, secret answers for the security questions, etc. that are to be submitted via HTTPS (SSL).
  • Check if the password, credit card numbers and other data is displayed in an encrypted format.
  • Check for SQL Injection for any page in your application that accepts user-entered information to access a database.
  • Verify that the error message shouldn’t display any important messages.
  • Test if the session is expired or the user logged out, he/she shouldn’t be able to navigate further to the system. 
  • Check if both secured and unsecured web pages are accessed directly without login.
  • Test the “View Source Code” option is disabled for the end-users.
  • Verify that all the cookies are stored in encrypted form. 

Password Testing 

  • Check if the password rules are implemented on all authenticated pages including set password, change the password and forgot password.
  • Test and make sure that users shouldn’t be able to login with the old passwords once it is changed.
  • Verify that users are restricted to log in the system if they enter the wrong passwords more than three times. 
  • Check if there is a restriction on a number of forgot password requests sent per day.
  • Verify that system cookies are not storing the passwords.

Types of Quality Testing That You Can Implement At Your End

The above has been an effort to make you understand the technical side of testing. Now we discuss the simple ways that you can use to test your site yourself.

Following are the do-it-yourself testing types:

  1. User Testing
  2. Content Testing
  3. Page Load Testing
  4. SEO Testing 
  5. Responsive Testing
  6. Performance Testing
  7. Form Testing

 

#1 User Testing

User testing is conducted to check if the UI of the website is displayed correctly as intended and if the site is usable to the end-user. This can also be considered as a process of software testing different aspects of user experience to identify and implement the best ways for a web application to interact with the audience. 

For example, if a new user logs into the application, it must be easy for him/her to navigate and use the site effectively. The major motive of this type of testing is to test the application on the basis of functional and user experience parameters.

Let’s discover the best ways to test a web application on different user design aspects – 

Color and Appearance 

  • Do the hyperlink colors match the standard color that is universally used?
  • Does the field background display in the correct color?
  • Does the field prompt display in the right color?
  • Does the screen and field colors display correctly for non-editable mode?
  • Does the site use standard link colors?
  • Do all the buttons display in standard format and size?
  • Does the general screen background displayed in the planned color?
  • Do the page background colors display in a distraction-free tone?

Images 

  • Check for the alignment of images in the web application.
  • Are the images throughout the application optimized for size?
  • Are other graphics in the application optimized for quick downloads?
  • Are all the button graphics matching throughout the application?
  • Does text wrap properly around pictures/graphics?

Navigation 

  • Does the screen navigation work as intended?
  • Does a scrollbar appear wherever scrolling is required?
  • Does the Tab Order specified on the screen goes in sequence from Top Left to bottom right (navigation done by pressing the tab key)? 
  • Is there a link to homepage on every single page? 
  • On loading, does a page allows tab focus display on the first editable field?
  • When an error message occurs, does the focus return to the field in error when the user cancels it? 

Other useful factors 

  • Are all the field prompts spell-checked?
  • Are fonts readable by the users?
  • Check if the text in command button & option box typed in full forms and not as abbreviations. 
  • Can a user run the system without any hassle? 
  • Do pages print legibly without cutting off text? 
  • Does the site convey a clear sense of its intended audience? 
  • Does the site have a consistent and clearly recognizable “look-&-feel”?

So, if you’ve checked your website on all the above-mentioned aspects, finalize the testing process by reconfirming the website on given points –

  • Identify if the users are able to easily and successfully complete the specific tasks. 
  • Check how efficiently users are able to undertake predetermined activities. 
  • Post checking the functional aspects, discover and pinpoint the certain changes that are needed to improve website performance.

#2 Content Testing

Content testing is the practice to check whether or not your web application content is suitable for your audience to explore. It also determines the motive of the web page.

Moreover, you can test the content from readability and visibility point of view so that it can portray the best example of accessibility and readability in front of website visitors. 

How to do web testing for content? 

  • Identify test goals: Your content test goals should be defined properly in terms of your user requirements, content strategy, content context and target users. 
  • Monitor content testing: It should be done on the basis of content usefulness, accessibility and content readability. 
  • Test content with users: Post setting all the strategies, you can invite a few users and ask them to test the website content if it’s optimized in all aspects or needs improvement.  

After setting the goals, quickly jump to the next task where have to check whether;

  • Font style and size in all the web pages is consistent.
  • All the screen prompts displayed in the defined and right font style.
  • The content while navigating between the pages is displayed consistently over there.
  • The text updated in all pages is aligned properly.
  • All the page headings are aligned left as per standards.
  • The text in all pages is displayed in sentence case.

#3 Page Load Testing

Everyone loves faster websites and if yours is not optimized for the speed you might be losing the quality audience. Now, you have solutions in your hand as you can make your website faster to load by checking how much time your website takes to load and what factors causing delays in page loading.

You can take the assistance of the most demanding tools listed below to check the website for load factors: 

Pingdom: It’s a trusted tool that is widely used by many of the small, middle and large enterprises to gain instant insights into your website’s performance so that a business can outsmart competition with amazing user experience. 

Google Page Insights: It’s a product of Google and so has secured optimum trust among users. Most of the website analyzers use this tool to make websites faster by discovering the best and weak factors affecting the website speed.

 

Google Page Speed Insights

 

Similarly, you can check your website’s loading speed by simply entering the URL. 

GTmetrix: Just like other above-mentioned tools, GTmetrix also provides ways to analyze how the website is performing, unleash the factors making it slow and lets the website owners discover all the page optimization opportunities.

#4 SEO Testing

SEO testing is not that easy as it sounds. Here, you need to check whether a web application is optimized for all the SERPs including Google. Skilled SEO professionals invest a lot of time in optimizing a website for a variety of factors. Below are the major aspects that you can utilize to check your website’s SEO level simply at your end.

  • Check for your website’s backlink profile by utilizing Ahrefs, possessing the biggest index of live backlinks i.e., 15 trillion. Being the most used SEO tool, this helps organizations by providing the complete insight on their business backlink profile. 

To proceed with this tool, all you need to do, put your website’s URL, like below-

 

Backlink Checker Tool

 

And go to “Check backlinks” button. The results you’ll get will be displayed in the below format.

 

Backlink Check Result

 

  • Check for your site’s loading speed, this can be done by – 
    • Compressing images
    • Deleting unnecessary files
    • Remove or disable unnecessary code with the help of a developer
    • Eliminating specific Java-Script code to remove above-the-fold functionality
  • Check for the Meta Tags, these should be optimally optimized and should be page oriented.
  • Keenly conduct a check for website content to check duplicacy. You can check a variety of tools to check content duplicacy. Use Siteliner, the best tool to check duplicate content on your site. This tool will render the entire website and single out the pages containing duplicate content.

 

Duplicate Content Checker

 

To explore, you can click the “+” option of particular report. 

  • Check for the website’s URL structure.
  • Check the website’s target keyword strategy.
  • Check whether your Robots file is accessible.
  • Verify structured data markup.
  • Check and update website content

Proceed further and figure out how you can practically implement all the steps:

Meta Tags: It’s the initial and very best practice to optimize a website for Google ranking. You can quickly follow the below guidelines to optimize Meta tags for your website. 

  • Meta tags should be written using page targeted keywords.
  • Character length of description should be appropriate and shouldn’t float outside the SERP page layout.
  • Use this SEO Snippet Optimization tool ( https://seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html) to check:
    • How your web page will be displayed in Google search results
    • How you can optimize your SERP snippets for higher CTR (Click Through Rates)

 

SEO Snippet Optimization tool

 

  • Meta Title should be keyword-targeted and written in a specified length. It directly impacts website ranking. 

Header Tags: Header tags improve the search engine visibility for

your page’s target keyword. To optimize header tags, you need to:

  • Place a single header tag in a web page targeted the main keyword.
  • Check how many subheader tags are there in a web page. All need to be optimized with other targeted keywords. 

Robots.txt: Robots.txt is a file structure, created to tell web robots or you can say search engines what pages on your website are to crawl. The best thing is, you can utilize the robots.txt file to disable the web pages that don’t need to be crawled. 

To check if your website’s Robots.txt is optimized or not, 

  • Make sure you’ve not restricted any content on your website that you want to be crawled.
  • Check whether any links are blocked because robots.txt don’t follow blocked links on a web page.
  • Don’t use robots.txt to restrict the website’s sensitive data (for example, private user information) from appearing in SERPs. 

To implement this approach, you have to first check whether your website has robots.txt or not. For this, you can simply type your root domain and add /robots.txt at the end of the URL. 

For example, Moz has created and located its robots.txt file at moz.com/robots.txt.

So, if you found such hierarchy, your website has robots.txt but if the results appear in the form of no .txt page, you need to create one. 

Go through the article, if you want to know how to create a new robot.txt file for your website. You can also check out the amazing tool to cross-check whether your robots.txt file has created and placed correctly

Sitemap.xml: You’ll find all the web page URLs in a Sitemap.xml file. This is the next best strategy one can use to crawl web pages more efficiently. This SEO practice also allows users to know the isolated URLs of the website. 

Here’s how you can create, optimize and check sitemap.xml?

Steps to follow:

  • Prioritize high-quality pages on your website. You can prioritize the pages containing – 
    • Compressed images and videos
    • Adequate highly-optimized content
    • Prompt user engagement through reviews and comments
  • Incorporate only canonical versions of pages in our sitemap. For example, check if you’ve not added multiple pages similar types (like product pages with same color and appearance). 
  • Avoid incorporating no-index URLs in the sitemap. 

Schema Markup: Have you ever seen rich snippets? Schema markup is somehow similar which is placed on a website to bring rich information for users. You can create and use schema markup to test how optimized your website is. 

You can implement this SEO strategy to optimize your website’s search opportunities.

  • Next, select the information you want to show as markup results.
  • Paste the data in the URL or the article that needs to be displayed for markup.
  • Highlight and select the types of elements for markup.
  • Continue adding markup items according to your requirements
  • Finally, create an HTML.
  • Next, add schema markup to your targeted web page.

This is how you’ll get a complete insight on site’s data post schema optimization. 

Image Alt tag: Images are the most important part when it comes to SEO testing a website. To evaluate image aspects, it’s needed to check all the images for ALT Tags.

Using ALT Tags or ALT Text for images defines an alternate text for an image. It’s the text which describes the image or its purpose on the web page. 

Test whether or not your website images are integrated with the right image ALT Tags. 

Canonical URLs: If your website is a larger one that contains multiple pages of similar types, it’s hard to prevent pages from becoming duplicates. It further generates the problem of content duplicacy. 

Setting the target page as canonical page is the technical solution that you can have to get rid of content duplicacy issues. Doing this will provide users the different products or key phrases falling under the same category. These days, SEO professionals consider it the best practice to maintain quality of a website. 

URLs Optimization: Testing URLs to check website quality is a valid point. You can implement it by creating an SEO-friendly website URL. Also, make sure the URL is created using the main target keyword. The best practice to create a webpage URL is to keep it simple by avoiding underscores and special characters. 

Website Speed Optimization: Website speed is the major factor to analyze the quality of a website. You can check it by using a variety of tools available over the web. Therefore, if you want to uplift your website’s quality traffic, make sure it doesn’t take too long to load. 

Mobile Friendliness: The best aspect to compel users towards your website is by giving them a uniform look regardless of knowing which mobile device they are using to access the content. Believe us, half of your battle ends here if you succeed in making your website mobile-friendly as these days, more than 50% of users access content on their smart devices. 

Explore this all in one tool to execute all your SEO optimization and testing tactics.

#5 Responsive Testing

It’s the easiest testing technique, allowing you to test website appearance on different parameters. The main motive of this testing is to make sure the web application is conveniently accessible on all types of operating systems and smart devices having variegated screens.

Just like the given image –

 

Responsive Web Application Testing

 

If you find the website troubling to access on different screens, you can optimize it by integrating – 

  • Flexible layouts
  • Flexible media
  • Flexible images
  • Easily adjustable content

And later, start checking your web application on given factors –

  • Check all the controls, text and images are aligned properly.
  • Verify if hover and selection state get highlights and changes colors.
  • Check if the text and CTA are designed with a suitable clickable area.
  • Evaluate consistency in shading, color and gradients (if available).
  • Check whether the edges are created with appropriate padding options.
  • Check text, images and color and content style shouldn’t overlap edges of the screen.
  • Verify if the style, font size and color are consistent for text placed on each web page.
  • Conduct an audit to check whether scrolling is working as expected on the website. 
  • Determine if all the pages possess perfect readability on different screen resolutions.
  • Verify all the links on the website are properly displayed and clickable. 
  • Check all the input and output boxes (if exist) are displayed and taking and providing values as per users’ command.
  • There should not be any horizontal scroll bar on the web page as everything needs to be fit according to the screen size and resolutions. 
  • While rotating the device, all the content of the website needs to be rotated and displayed uniformly without glitches. 

For better insights, you can finally set a few points to check your web application for responsive factors:

  • First of all, decide how your app is going to be used. You can get actual insights by exploring Google Analytics where you’ll get to know the devices customers are using to reach your web application.
  • Utilize Analytics to choose the device you want to get the majority of users on. 
  • By selecting and auditing the device, you can get an idea of how your website will be working on other devices as it’s not possible to test the website for every device available. 
  • Set and test what should be appeared when the user accesses your web application.

For the better and high-level functional responsive test, use automation tools and emulators. You can try Responsive Design Checker, Sceenfly, Designmodo and many more.

#6 Performance Testing

Performance testing is also the most crucial part of the website quality assurance testing checklist which is conducted to evaluate the system for stability and scalability factors under different load conditions.

Performance testing is of different types and can be done by inspecting the website for – 

  • Capacity testing
  • Load testing 
  • Volume testing
  • Stress testing 
  • Soak testing 
  • Spike testing 

Go through the link to know more about each type of performance testing.

Also, make sure all the described points are ticked right when you execute a performance test for your website –

Load Pages Faster (Desktop)

  • Minimize HTTP requests.
  • Combine HTML, CSS, JS & Font Files.
  • Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files.

  • TTFB has to be under 200 ms, but, in our case its 1.6 second.

 

TTFB Testing

 

Time to first byte, or TTFB, is the amount of time a browser has to wait before getting its first byte of data from the web server. Read this https://kinsta.com/blog/ttfb/ 

  • Enable browser caching in .htaccess file. Static resources should have a cache lifetime of at least a week. Third-party resources like ads or widgets should have a cache lifetime of at least one day.

For all cacheable resources like JavaScript and CSS files, image files, media files, and PDFs, set caching between a minimum of one week and one year.

  • Use Compressor.io to reduce image sizes and compress them – use Pingdom to test page speed.
  • Load CSS as external files. avoid including CSS in HTML code (like in divs or your headings), We get cleaner code if you put all of your CSS in your external stylesheet.
  • Prioritize above-the-fold content (lazy loading) – above the fold (top of the page) section load faster — even if the rest of the page takes a few seconds to load.

  • Reduce additional external scripts.
  • Responsive Design.

Mobile-Friendly Pages:

  • Check if the content appears well on different small mobile devices.
  • Verify whether or not the content is easily readable on a variety of mobile devices.
  • Check if navigation and links are smooth and easily clickable.
  • Evaluate if it’s easy to consume the content through various screen sizes.
  • Check if the content automatically adjusts when accessed to different mobile screens.

You can check your website’s mobile friendliness by utilizing Google’s most used mobile-friendly test tool

This is how the tool presents results for your website’s mobile-friendliness factors.

 

Mobile-friendly Page Testing

 

#7 Form Testing

Form testing is easy and one of the most important steps to check the quality of a website. And the best part is, there’s no need for technical or coding knowledge to carry out such type of testing. Anyone can easily verify the form by following the below aspects. 

  • Check if the scripting aspects are working properly or not. For example – if users don’t fill any of the mandatory fields in the form, an error message should appear. 
  • All the default values should be populated in the fields. 
  • Check if the user filled data is sent to a live database or is directly delivered to the registered email address.
  • The form should be appropriately formatted and optimized for readability.

Here, you also need to make sure on various other form aspects that are given below –

Use inline form field validation

User’s information is checked live as she moves throughout the form — if she suddenly puts an incorrect email address, for instance, red text will appear below the form field, so she doesn’t have to reach the bottom before learning it can’t process.

Inline message alerts:

  • First Name*: Please enter your first name
  • Last Name*: Please enter your last name
  • Email*: Please enter a valid email address
  • Phone Number: Please enter a valid phone number (at the bottom)
    Phone eg: +12536587589 (at the top)

See image for reference:

Inline Form Message Alert

 

  • Organization”: Please select your organization
  • Budget”: Please select a budget range
  • Message”: Please enter your top-level requirements
  • Timeline”: Please select a timeline

If someone directly clicks on the CTA, then all fields will turn red with alert messages.

This is how it should look like –

 

Message Alert for Wrong Entry

 

 
After considering all the above-mentioned factors, you must have got a stronghold on all types of testing approaches. Now, let’s move to the next step; make your development team aware of intacting quality aspects during product development life cycle. 

Mandatory Steps: Development Team Should Adhere for Website Quality Assurance

A web application can’t succeed until it is developed and tested by following a foolproof process. The quality assurance process iterates right with the stage of development. So, don’t consider that you can only implement it at the end of product development. 

Let’s figure out what steps developers or development team should follow to make a product quality-certified right from the first stage:

Concept-based knowledge of the project

The concept of the project should be clear in every developers’ mind. It’s the initial stage where most of the features are documented and decided to get integrated into the web application. 

Here, the developers must have knowledge about all the features but don’t know how exactly these will be built. The role of the testing engineer is to understand the feature requirements for the product and find ways how users can interact with them. 

This not only helps developers get an overview of the project but also let them know what is accepted in the market. 

Clarity on mockups and designs

This is also an initial stage procedure that is done by the developers when they are more clear about the website’s features integration. Here, the test engineer’s understanding will be changed on how the website will be built and tested based on user behavior. 

It’s the phase where the development team might not get an idea on how to develop the functionality but as a testing engineer has already delved deep into the targeted user behavior he/she can help the development team to build the function that can lead the users in the right direction. 

Analysis of recent bugs through ticket creation process

Ticket creation is the best and the most effective phase to synchronize the development along with keeping quality-assurance in mind. It’s the technique where the testing team test each developed module and raise a ticket if they find any bug. These tickets are then sent to the corresponding developer or the development team with a message to resolve the issue. 

Most of the web development organizations follow this ticket raising trick to get all the issues resolved at the time of development. This technique also reduces the chances of getting more bugs in a system at the end of development. 

Above all, it’s the best-recommended development strategy, helping the entire development and testing unit build and deliver a high-quality web application

Troubleshoot issues to ensure quality assurance with testing 

Till this phase, the product is almost finalized based on the concept decided at the initial phase, all the documented features are integrated and tested by development, tickets are raised for all the major and minor module loopholes. 

So, what’s left? 

The only thing which is left is the final testing of the system based on the web application testing checklist. It’s the document the team has prepared  The testing team can also seek the help of development team to resolve the in-lined issues more effectively so that they don’t affect the website functionality again. 

Here, the role of quality testers would be high and requires keen attention to each and every module of the web application. The reason because it’s the last phase where the system is being tested and expected to meet with the defined industry standards. 

Go beyond issue reporting before final release and project deployment

In this phase of web application testing, the associated team needs to ensure that the product delivery is smooth. It’s their responsibility to check all the features of the system on a replica system to ensure everything is running fine. Now, this can be done in two ways: Manual and Automated.

Manual testing is the most prior tactic that most of the testing engineers follow to make the product free from bugs. But sometimes the strategy leads to missing things that shouldn’t be missed from the testing point of view. Here, automated testing techniques work best where nothing can be missed from getting inspected. 

Most of the best web or app development companies approach the methods as per product requirements and deliver a top-notch product that meets with industry quality parameters. 

So far, you must have got an immense idea of how you can test your web application without staffing a testing team at your end. Let’s make it more interesting and convenient for you by giving you a brief about the best quality assurance testing tools that you can utilize to get efficient results. 

Top Web Application Usability Testing Tools 

In this section, you will be aware of a variety of tools you can utilize to test your web application manually and automatically. 

Best Used Manual or Online Web Testing Tools

  1. Crazy Egg
  2. User Testing
  3. Mockplus
  4. Optimizely
  5. UsabilityHub
  6. Userbrain
  7. ClickTale
  8. WhatUsersDo
  9. Userfeel
  10. UsersThink

Best Used Automated Tools 

  1. Selenium
  2. Katalon Studio
  3. UFT
  4. Test Complete
  5. SoapUI
  6. IBM Rational Functional Tester (RFT)

The aforementioned are the best tools, most of the web development organizations use to achieve high-quality products. 

For more details on automation testing, please read here 

Initially, the sole motive of this blog is to guide you through the DIY steps to test your web application. But, here I have something else to discuss which is also related to website testing and quality assurance. 

How to keep track of the development team for quality during the development of each phase?

First of all, be clear about one thing that quality assurance and testing are different. Testing is all about verifying each module and section for its defined functionality. It is generally done by the testing professionals at the end of project development. 

On the other hand quality assurance is not the aspect that needs to be started when the development is done. Rather, development team needs to keep quality-assurance in mind while building the modules so that there are less chances of bulk errors in the end product. 

How you can prepare the team for quality assurance?

Only a project manager has the guts to make the team understand the importance of keeping quality assurance in mind during product development. He can help them understand the winning strategy where they can reach only by considering the below steps.

Why QA is crucial? 

It is essential for making the product’s delivery as expected and up to the mark. 

The very first task of a manager is to tell the team why QA for web application is necessary for successful product delivery. QA is the person who is responsible for taking care of all the quality-related tasks for a product. 

Most of the companies have staffed their own QA team to uplift their development and product delivery process. But what if a company doesn’t possess that much budget for their project? 

Here, the existing team has to bear all the testing responsibilities and it’s only a manager’s role to put the things in their mind that quality analysis is not rocket science and they also execute on their own. He can analyze the team efforts for QA by setting the targets –

  • To check the entire site for smooth access and navigation
  • To verify all the links available on the web pages
  • To check whether contact and feedback forms are working fine
  • To check all the functionalities for accurate outcomes
  • To verify if the look and feel of the website is designed as expected

Testing these fields at the development phase brings a QA approach in development team which ultimately helps them build better products than before. 

Injecting the quality mindset 

Keeping the quality intact in the final product is not the way to succeed as it should be thoroughly maintained in all phases of the product development life cycle including requirement gathering, design, development and deployment. To get this done, every member of the team should be involved in making the product quality-approved and they take initiative to reduce the testing overheads. 

A project manager can implement the below criteria by – 

  • Writing the project requirements with acceptance conditions 
  • Ask the team to create better design specifications that can easily be verified 
  • Set the team to conduct in-depth unit and local testing before deploying software to the testing environment

If this strategy is planned and distributed across the team, it’s sure that a product can build with quality parameters. It helps the team leads smarter, faster and less tedious development and testing. 

Keep this in mind, that quality has not been maintained by having the focus of a few team members rather it is achieved by having everyone’s eye on the process. 

Product management by keeping quality in mind 

It quite difficult for a project manager to be active on all the factors of the project including development and testing. But it would be great if he/she does this for the sake to attain quality in each aspect. 

Project managers might not have technical development and testing skills but still, he has most of the knowledge of the product than others in the team. He knows all the touchpoints that need to be achieved during development and testing. 

Due to knowing all the major and minor points of the project, he can keep the project deadlines tight to attain defined quality parameters. 

If a manager is not able to keep a close tab on all the project aspects as the project is big, staffing an APM would be another beneficial option instead of hiring a testing team. This keeps the project manager close to all the quality parameters. 

Task ownership and accountability

Most probably, the project managers handover the ownership and accountability of the project only on engineers. The reason is, testing and development engineers are the ones who know the strong and weak points of the product that are needed to be observed. 

But if you want to present an optimum quality product to the world, you need to ask your team to put extra efforts to reach the goals. This can be done through following steps –

  • The worst code requires more testing: Make sure the team is building meticulous code for the product so that it takes less time to test and verify. It also reduces the time and effort to test the module. 
  • Involve everyone in the picture of product quality testing: It’s not only the duty of development and testing engineers to follow web testing guidelines. Involving the other departments including designers is sensible to iterate the web application testing process. 

The engineers, designers and producers then test the website on different versions to check if it is accessible and running flawlessly. Their feedback is then noted and optimized for the product’s betterment. 

  • Ask QA and other teams to test the product at their end by keeping a user’s perspective in mind: Setting a centralized team to test the final version of the software is a great as it lets the team knows the exact point of view a user would give after using the same. It’s the best strategy created with the motive to try the product and portray genuine feedback for the same. 

Think to achieve 100% quality instead of 90% 

A product can achieve 90% accuracy and quality factors by following the above web application testing checklist. It’s proven and has been adopted by many companies as their ideal process. The results can be 100% if the team dedicatedly starts adhering to the quality assurance factors defined by a project manager.

This is all you can do to make your web application not only quality-assured but also an interactive piece that users will love and happily interact with.

I hope you enjoyed reading the blog and understood all the points to carry out quality assurance for web testing. 

You can also download our website QA checklist for more clear and point-to-point quality assurance insights.

Download The Checklist Here

Now that you know how and what to test. Here is a quick checklist you can use and keep for reference and also track your development teams testing efforts too.

Finally a checklist that you can use all by yourself 

I hope you find this useful. And if you do, write your comments below and feel free to share it with your peers who need it too.

Also subscribe to my blog so you can get such amazing articles first – straight to your inbox.

All the best!

 

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do you test a website?

Website or web application testing can be easily and effectively carried out by implementing the rules of various testing methods including Usability Testing, Functionality Testing, Data Verification, and Validation Testing, Web Security Testing, Database Testing, Database, and Software Integration Testing.

2. What is Web testing with examples?

Web testing or website testing is attributed to the process of checking the final website or application based on design and functionality factors. This is used to free the website from future errors. Also, web testing can be done by effectively implementing Usability, Functionality, Interface, Performance, Compatibility, and Security testing methods.

3. What is tested in website testing?

Website or web application testing is a software testing process where the solution is tested to find out potential runtime errors. The process is required to get accomplished before the final product goes live to make sure that there is no flaw in the final product.

4. What is a quality control checklist?

A quality control checklist is prepared in the form of detailed documentation where certain rules and regulations are defined to help testing professionals. It is equally considered as an in-depth guide that lets quality checkers know what they need to do to make a website or application flawless.

5. What are the best types of tests to perform on web-based applications?

Usability and Functionality testing are the major testing pillars when it comes to making a web-based application free from harmful bugs. Apart from these two, there are compatibility, performance, database, compatibility, security and crowd testing that are also useful to achieve a bug-free and quality product.

6. What is the difference between testing web application and desktop application?

Web-based applications are installed only once and are tested for their functionality, operating system compatibility and browser compatibility. On the contrary, desktop applications need to be installed separately on different systems and are evaluated for factors like GUI, backend, and load-bearing capability.

7. What is security testing for Web application?

Web applications’ security testing is determined to check the solution for optimum security levels. It is especially implemented to check whether the web application is robust enough to combat all the hacking or data breach issues.

8. What is website quality assurance?

Quality assurance is the most important phase of testing where it is assured that the users get quality and ultimate experience while using a website or web application. It also unfolds the flaws and hidden issues that mistakenly overlooked at the time of rigorous testing.

9. How do you manually test a website?

Manual testing is the most basic factor to find out errors in a website or application. In this case, testers act like end-users and test each feature and function to check whether everything is working properly. Here, testers initially make a plan and implement all the documented use cases without using any automation tool.

10. What should I test in a Web application?

If you want to achieve the desired results from a web application, it’s mandatory to test it for functionality, database connectivity, usability, performance, and security parameters.

11. What are Web testing tools?

Selenium is counted as the best automation tool that is broadly used by almost all the web testing professionals to render immaculate solutions.

12. How do you do quality assurance?

Quality assurance for a website and web application is based on the process of defining the quality requirements and check whether standard testing procedures are used. The process includes activities like process documentation and checklist and comprehensive process audit.

13. Which testing tool is in demand for 2020?

Selenium is being extensively used by many web development companies and developers to make the websites error-free and quality-approved. This can be considered the best testing tool for 2020. Besides, there are different other tools like TestComplete, Test Studio, Robotium, Visual Studio Test Professional, QTP, etc. that can also be used for web testing purposes.