A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk QA For Web Sites: Approaches To Testing Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath, BA2 7AY URL UKOLN is supported by:

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 2 Automated Testing Automated Testing: Should be scalable Only suitable approach for large Web sites Can push ( ) information about problems Many free automated testing tools available but: Will not spot all usability / accessibility problems Can provide too much information Comprehensive and configurable testing tools can be expensive

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 3 Manual Testing Manual Testing: Can spot usability / accessibility problems Can make use of one’s community / user base / peers Can use of key pages which will identify problems which occur elsewhere Particularly useful for testing new Web sites “5 users can spot most of your problems” but: Not suitable for testing large numbers of pages Quality of feedback may be variable Often not useful for testing established Web sites

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 4 Approaches To Automated Testing Automated testing can make use of: Desktop tools Web-based tools UKOLN has made use of Web-based testing tools: Monitor accessibility, HTML, CSS, compliance, page size, links quality, nos. of links, etc. Benchmarking approach provides comparison with one’s peers See, for example,

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 5 Benchmarking (2)

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 6 Peer Review Peer Review: “Give me comments on my Web site and I’ll also test yours” Can help in community-building Particularly useful for programmes in which project Web sites being developed at same time But: Can be difficult in processing unstructured responses Need to manage process

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 7 Managing Peer Reviews UKOLN is developed a peer review system to support its advisory service for NOF-digi projects

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 8 Conclusions To conclude: There is probably a need to make use of both automated and manual approaches to testing You can use these approaches within your own department / organisation There are advantages to be gained in working with one’s peers How should we do this?