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I thought I would share this small piece of advice. It might be obvious to a lot of people but is not always apparent or sometimes we forget or even run out of time to pay enough attention to it.
The advice is simply this:
When you report a bug or issue and the developer tells you it’s fixed, always check that it is actually fixed.
Sounds obvious doesn’t it?
Think back to times when you have taken the word of the developer that a particular bug has been fixed and decided not to test it or verify that it had actually been completed. Ok, it sounds a bit strong that you knowingly decided not to test the bug fix, you could have been swayed by a couple of factors. Perhaps that developer has always fixed bugs satisfactorily in the past or maybe you didn’t have the time to check the bug had been fixed properly and so gambled that it had been fully dealt with.
Whatever the reasons the result is that the bug fix did not get checked out and verified. For many issues, the fix put in place would simply have worked and that would be the end of the matter. That particular bug would never be heard of again, the gamble paid off.
But what are the chances that the fix did not work, or created a new previously undetected bug or that the developer misinterpreted the bug report and his or her fix is not what you expected. In my experience, the chances of things like this happening are pretty good (website testers are such a pessimistic bunch).
Continue reading That Bug You Reported – It’s Fixed!
As a website is being built, the step of writing or putting together a test plan is often skipped entirely and testing just ‘begins’. If a test plan is done then it is often completed immediately prior to testing and completed too quickly.
This ad hoc approach to testing means that it is possible to miss large sections of functionality and not be able to fully consider all permutations or variations of events and actions that need to be tested.
For most websites, there is a fairly long list of items that need to be tested as part of any new website development and in order to know what to test, when you tested it and whether those tests passed or failed, it is best to make a proper plan.
We are going to show you how to write a simple and straightforward test plan, which will provide a more systematic method for testing your website but the process outlined below is still essentially a manual one. We are not yet moving into using software tools to help identify and run tests, nor are we covering automated testing here, although I hope to write a post on these aspects in due course.
Continue reading How To Write A Test Plan
Over on my main company website and blog, www.webdepend.co.uk, I’ve put up a post aimed at graphic design agencies but may relate to many types of agencies or organisations that produce websites and experience bottlenecks when it comes to fully testing and launching those sites.
I go on to suggest some solutions but what I really wanted to put across to graphic design agencies are what I see as the benefits of outsourcing their website testing to an external company.
The benefits put forward in that post may be arguments that you agree or disagree with. Either way, I would be interested to gain your feedback – would you consider or do you outsource any testing to another party or do you intend on making sure that all testing remains in-house? What are the pros and cons of either approach in your view?
You can read the full post here:
http://www.webdepend.co.uk/2010/05/08/website-testing-problems-for-graphic-design-agencies/
An area that has not been looked at in much detail yet on this blog is what software or tools you can use to record and track bugs, issues or defects that you find when testing a website.
One of the first posts I wrote, which described a typical Web Testing process, mentioned that a bug tracking system ‘can be hugely beneficial, as you can set priorities for each bug and then understand how many bugs you have at each priority level. It gives you a much better understanding of how many bugs you have to fix before you can launch and calculate how long you expect that process to take.’
There are a good range of bug tracking applications out there, a lot of them web-based, which are vital when tracking bugs and associated information about each issue. Here we take a look at 4 of the main players in bug tracking software, which are also available in our Testing Tools Directory.
Why Use Bug Tracking Software?
Once you start testing a website you can come up with all sorts of bugs and issues that need addressing. I’m talking a bit more than the odd typo or broken image. Perhaps you find problems with the site search returning strange results or the checkout process not working correctly or there are specific issues in different browsers that work fine in other browsers. There are several different reasons to use an application that tracks bugs and feature requests.
Continue reading Bug Tracking Software Options
When I’m reading blog posts, news articles or Twitter discussions concerning the testing of websites, the article or discussion in question actually relate to a single aspect of testing and gives the impression that there is only one form of website testing that we should be concerned with.
At the moment that testing subject of choice is known as Conversion Rate Testing, or sometimes called CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). This would normally mean that the tests being carried out are Split Tests or Multivariate Tests, using software such as Google Weboptimizer.
Don’t get me wrong, conversion rate testing is really important and can greatly increase the number of conversions on a particular page, which can raise sales, enquiries, profits or whatever aspect of conversion you are trying to improve.
But there are other forms of testing websites, quite a few in fact, and some that are quite basic that get overlooked. I wanted to give a brief description for each type of testing to help you understand all the areas that can (and should) be tested when launching a new website, rolling out a set of updates or at least checking on a regular basis.
Continue reading 10 Different Forms of Website Testing
Over the last 12 months or so there have been a number of relatively inexpensive web-based usability testing applications launched. These testing tools have been gaining in popularity, as usability testing has often been seen as a time consuming and expensive exercise, seemingly only possible with the right equipment and personnel involved. We take a look at 3 different usability testing applications.
As many usability experts have been saying for quite a while now, any usability testing is better than no usability testing and the online community has responded by providing us with an excellent choice of potentially enlightening applications for our website or web application.
I have gathered 29 of these usability testing tools together and linked to each within my testing tools directory.
It crossed my mind to provide a bit more of a comparison between some of the usability applications to give you an idea of the features of each, what they provide and how much they cost.
Continue reading 3 Usability Testing Tools – Quick Comparison
Now contains a total of 96 website testing tools spanning 14 different categories.
I’ve taken some time to update, reorganise and expand the testing tools page so that it become more of a directory rather than just a long list. This makes it easier for me to maintain and add to plus easier (hopefully) for you to find the testing tools that you are looking for.
The Testing Tools page now serves as the main entrance into the directory with each category having its own page. Each category will continue to have more software and tools added over time plus there will be additional category or two coming along shortly.
Continue reading Updated Testing Tools Directory
 Example of www.asda.co.uk's 404 page I have come to the end of my blog series on how the major UK supermarkets use custom 404 pages to improve the user experience.
The supermarket that started this off was Asda, when I stumbled across the fact that the main Asda web site did not have a custom 404 page and took me to the horrible server default 404 page. At the time I couldn’t believe it, I thought all major retailers would have had this basic principle of web development covered and be doing a good job of 404 pages.
Then I realised that Asda had quite a few other web sites so I started investigating those, found more web sites with no custom 404 pages and the list grew and grew until I had 25 Asda web sites in total, 9 of which do not have a custom 404 page at all.
If Asda are that bad, how do the other supermarkets compare?
Continue reading Supermarket Study Into 404 Page Use Summary
 Sainsburys Home Page The third part of my series on looking at supermarkets web sites to see how they use 404 pages to direct users if they get lost and so make sure that the overall user experience is a decent one.
The first two parts investigated Asda and Tesco who, between them, have almost 40 web sites. Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Morrison’s, Somerfield and the Co-Op have a lot less and so this post should be a bit shorter as a result.
I’ll just quickly mention that if you are not sure what 404 pages are and why web sites should have them (especially major UK retailers) then you can read my introduction to 404 pages here.
Of the 5 supermarkets that we are going to have a look at today, let’s start with Sainsbury’s.
Continue reading Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Morrison’s, Somerfield and Co-Operative
 Tesco.com web site This is the second in my series of looking at supermarkets and how they use 404 pages to direct users if they get lost and so improve the overall user experience.
The supermarket that started this series off was Asda and the poor or nonexistent 404 pages that I found across a lot of their sites. You can read that post here and if you do it may help you to understand the context of this one.
If you are not sure what 404 pages are and why web sites should have them (especially major UK retailers) then you can read my introduction to 404 pages here.
So last time it was Asda and this time around we are reviewing Tesco’s web sites, the biggest UK supermarket chain.
Continue reading Tesco is disappointing in its adoption of 404 pages
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