Quality Assurance – The Overlooked Necessity

An overlooked yet vital part to building and maintaining successful websites is quality assurance or QA. Quality Assurance refers to systematically testing a new website or any modifications to current websites to ensure that the flow and functionality are working properly. The primary goal of testing is to make sure that the end user has a positive experience on our clients’ websites. The most sure-fire way to lose a customer is to have a website that is frustrating to navigate or that doesn’t work correctly.  In Peacock Production Studios effort to provide top-notch quality assurance, we spent approximately 17% of our time testing websites last year.

Our Process 

Peacock Production Studios has a specific workflow in place to make sure that quality assurance is a priority. Utilizing communication portals and repositories, we are able to effectively communicate each step of the way. The basic flow is for the developers to make their changes and push to a testing environment, called stage, which mirrors the production site. Once the changes are in stage, our QA department will perform thorough testing and provide instant feedback to the developers, if necessary. After testing in stage is complete and everything is working properly, these changes will be pushed to the production environment where the public is able to see and use the updated software. Once “live” in production, thorough testing needs to be done immediately to ensure the file deployment took hold and that there are no issues in the live version.

Definition of Quality Assurance

Now that you understand Peacock Production Studios quality assurance process flow, it’s time to look into exactly what goes into QA. Updates to websites can be as simple as changing a phone number or as complex as modifications to a complicated shipping calculator. While we can’t possibly cover everything that needs to be tested in this article, there are a few major items we will discuss. First, a testing checklist needs to be defined based on the technology being built. Our example will be the launching of a new ecommerce website. Our process involves having our QA department work closely with the development team at the very beginning of a new build. We want to catch any issues early during development; things that could potentially be carried throughout the site if not caught early and lead to longer delays down the road. Depending on the site, the order of testing may be different, but there are several common things to check. We will take a look at those now.

Functionality Testing 

Functionality testing for an ecommerce site involves checking all of the links on each page of the website to ensure they direct to the proper page, testing all submission forms on the site and to make sure that customers are able to add products to the cart and checkout. The most important component on an ecommerce website is the shopping cart. During this process, correct calculations of taxes, duties and surcharges needs to be tested. It is also very important to ensure that all product options, like color and quantity, are following the order throughout the checkout process. Finally, thorough testing needs to be done to ensure that any shipping carrier APIs are connected, working and bringing back correct results.

Usability Testing

Usability testing involves making sure that the navigation is easy and consistent for the user. Content needs to be proofread and the search feature returns relevant results. Usability testing is in essence making sure you provide a good experience for people coming to the website. In other words, is it user-friendly? In reference to an ecommerce site, it is vital that visitors to your “store” are comfortable moving about and can obtain pertinent information easily. The more comfortable they are, the more likely that they will make purchases on your site.

Cross Platform Testing

In an ideal world for web developers there would only be one universal browser and one operating system. Of course, this is not the case and compatibility testing is an extremely important part of quality assurance. It is vital for developers to write code that is cross browser compatible. Some applications are dependent on browser settings, especially if you are using AJAX, javascript and the latest version of CSS. Once new code has been pushed to stage for testing, our QA team will typically check these changes in the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. We even check the previous version of Internet Explorer, since it is the most common browser. QA will also make sure the changes are working in the latest two versions of Microsoft Windows and Apple iOS.

Mobile Testing

As more and more people are making purchases using their smart phones, mobile testing is becoming a vital component of quality testing. As part of our QA process, we ensure that the functionality works and the layout looks good on mobile devices like the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Another important product to perform mobile testing on is tablets, like the iPad. With all of the various tablets on the market today, it is nearly impossible to test all of them, but it is necessary to check Apple and Android devices, at the minimum.

Security Testing

The final step in performing quality assurance is to make sure that the website is secure. This includes testing all contact forms and make sure that all validation and captcha is working properly. SQL injection is a popular security risk and building strong forms is crucial for any ecommerce site. Also important is to make sure that all security certificates are up to date and that the user is directed to a secure URL (https://) when providing personal information like address and payment method, particulary credit card information. Many end users, rightfully so, will not purchase products if the site doesn’t appear secure.  Although Peacock Production Studios always encrypts sensitive data, it is essential to security test for ecommerce compliance such as PCI or SET.

Conclusion

As you can see, quality assurance is an integral component of any successful website launch or upgrade release. Without thorough testing, end users can become frustrated, be given incorrect information or worse, not be able to purchase products at all. Peacock Production Studios values quality assurance and devotes the time and resources necessary to ensure that our client’s websites are performing at peak levels. While QA is not the most glamorous task that we perform, we understand its importance in building functional, easy to use websites. In order to have a successful ecommerce website, customers must feel comfortable navigating the site and trust that their information will remain secure. We hope this article has stressed the importance of thorough quality assurance in relation to building your customer base. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us.

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Case Study – PicnicTables.com

Peacock Production Studios will be posting case studies detailing the many websites that we have developed and maintained over the years. From logo design through the latest upgrades, we will provide an in-depth look at the various processes involved in developing and maintaining a professional website. We begin our series looking at PicnicTables.com which was the first website we developed for our client’s “Franchise Ecommerce Websites”.

Logo Design

When developing a website from scratch, the first step in the process is to design a logo. A logo can be colorful or gray, playful or serious, simple or complex. Depending on the style that is selected by the client, it will drive the layout and “feel” for the website.  The directive for the logo design of PicnicTables.com was pretty straight-forward. The client was looking for a simple, colorful design. The obvious choice was, you guessed it, a picnic table! After many iterations, the green and yellow color scheme was chosen in an attempt to capture the feel of the outdoors.

The logo was designed in Adobe Illustrator in a vector format so that it could be used for marketing campaigns, print advertising, etc. It is extremely important to create your logo in a format that is easily transferrable across various media sources. The logo is the first step in creating a company’s brand and we strive to make it as easy as possible for our clients to use their logo in whatever marketing campaigns may arise in the future.

Website Design

Once the logo was selected we had a visual marketing brand to work with.  In order to help brand establishment, we styled the interface to match the chosen logo. Due to this being the first website of many for this client, the design was created with these other websites in mind in order to maintain a consistent feel. There are a number of different ways to create Websites. While some may choose to hand draw a concept and then start coding HTML, we take a more graphical approach to the design and layout using Photoshop. The designing of the interface is very important for usability. If a visitor to your site can’t easily locate your content or if the layout is confusing to them, they will leave your website. With any new design, you must plan ahead. This will enable you to adapt to any changes that arise quickly and easily. PicnicTables.com in particular has many products and images. With that in mind, special attention during the design process was given to facilitate fast loading pages. Also, knowing that there would eventually be “sister” websites, we focused on creating a design that would work across multiple products.

Website Construction

After the website design was complete we then cut the design into web based code using HTML, CSS & jQuery.  Using well-defined Meta, h1 and h2 tags, the code was written to be search engine friendly.  During this process, the basic colors for the website were created. Again, using the selected logo as our guide, we created the site in green and yellow to keep a consistent feel throughout the website.

PicnicTables.com is an e-commerce website so during the construction of the site, particular focus was given to creating a shopping cart. The shopping cart for PicnicTables.com contains many features, including credit card processing, real-time shipping rates, order receipt page and e-mail and the flexibility to modify your product.

 

Custom Programming

You may think that after a website is developed and pushed into production that the work is done. This is definitely NOT the case. As PicnicTables.com attracted more and more customers, many enhancements were requested from our client. These include, but are not limited to:

Promotion and Banner Management

Dynamic Content

Product Search

Google Analytics Tracking

Sitemap.xml

Testimonials

Reviews

Canadian Shipping

 

As of the time of this posting, all of the above enhancements have been completed except for promotion and banner management. One of the next major upgrades includes promotion and banner management.

Search Engine Optimization

Even if you have the coolest website in the world, it doesn’t do much good if potential customers can’t find it. In order for a business to prosper on the internet, they must be ranked high in search engines. Early in the development process, Peacock Production Studios pays close attention to optimizing websites for search engines. By utilizing dynamic sitemaps, static product page names and keywords (along with our trade secrets), we make your site attractive to search engine spiders. While nobody can guarantee a #1 ranking, we constantly are working on maintaining a search engine friendly site. Currently, when you search “picnic tables”, PicnicTables.com is third^th result in Yahoo and 6^th result in Google. These are impressive rankings considering all of the businesses that sell picnic tables. In fact, PicnicTables.com is ranked higher than Lowe’s and Target!

In closing, PicnicTables.com has been a huge success. As with any successful Ecommerce site, there are continuous upgrades and enhancements. Not only are these upgrades requested by the client, but you must stay ahead of the technology curve and try to beat your competitors to the latest and greatest features. Again, PicnicTables.com was the first franchise Ecommerce  website we created. We have successfully mirrored this site for 9 other franchise sites.

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Outsourcing Your Web Technology

Peacock Production Studios is a business based in Florida that develops web-based & mobile technologies. We are constantly faced with clients expecting us to compete with overseas prices.  The internet has definitely made the statement “It’s A Small World” much more true.  Big corporations have paved the way, and now even small businesses are looking to take advantage of outsourcing, especially when it comes to technology.  Although Peacock Production Studios has an in-house staff, even we have utilized resources from other countries, so we thought we would take some time to outline some of the considerations that should be pondered if you are looking to outsource overseas.

Project Management is the Difference
One thing that clients quickly learn when they stop using their local web development firm and begin using overseas resources is that project management becomes more of a full-time job.  From our experience, clients are not usually sure what they want until they see something then they have feedback on how to change it. Only about 5% of the clients we have built technologies for actually have a detailed scope of work prepared before getting quotes.  We work closely with our clients, interviewing them and establishing an outline of the actual work required before offering pricing.  So from the very beginning of the process, we typically take on the role of project management.  We enter the work into our workflow and manage what tasks need to be completed by what groups and by what date.  The majority of the time, we serve as the architect using our knowledge of customer experience, technology restrictions and client requests to manage the process and the outcome.

When a client decides to deal with overseas resources they are required to be the architect of the technology as well as the project manager. The definition of the work must be specifically outlined and detailed tasks established to keep forward momentum.  Clients that do not have a full-time project manager and little to no project management experience themselves become extremely busy managing the construction of their technology.

Disputes and Litigation
Have you ever had to deal with a court case involving you and a contractor, or any court case at all for that matter?  Then you know how draining and expensive it can be. Now imagine that the entity you are in dispute with is in a completely different country. Luckily, there haven’t been legal or intellectual property issues with the groups we have used, but we’ve heard some horror stories. If you choose to outsource either overseas or domestically, make sure your software contracts and non-disclosure agreements are in order. For more information on this topic, please read our article on software agreements.

Project Oriented Work vs. Billable Hours
It is common in the technology development industry for projects to be separated into one of these two payment methods.   Our firm actually services our client base in both ways depending on their needs.  As an American outsourcing company, we serve as the technology department for other small to medium-sized businesses as well as building technology on a project basis.  If your technology needs are substantial enough to pay for a full-time developer, then outsourcing in general is probably a good idea, even if you go overseas.  Most overseas developers are contracted on a monthly basis, 40 hours a week, at a reduced hourly rate.  Finding development groups that do work on a project basis may be more of a challenge.  Also keep in mind that once a technology is constructed, even if it is just a brochure based website, there will always be some kind of maintenance required if you want it to evolve or stay fresh.

Morality of Outsourcing
The topic of outsourcing is one of extreme opinion.  Many are focused on the loss of jobs for American workers, while other are concentrated on competing in today’s marketplace.  While economic isolation is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, some companies are forced to reduce overhead costs to compete in a global market. Business decisions are typically made with the bottom line in mind. The reduction in costs such as payroll taxes and salaries, as well as the ability to offer a wider variety of services, makes outsourcing very appealing to many companies.  So where does the moral compass come into play?  If you were a company that produced waste and you could dump it in an unauthorized land fill to save your company some overhead, would you?  Let’s hope not.  Is sending your jobs to other countries the same?  Well that all depends on your own morality. Some would say both maneuvers are ruining America. Some would argue that we live in a global economy and international lines should become more blurred.  The fact of the matter is that the business owner(s) need to make the outsourcing decision based on what they feel is right for their company based on their own set of moral boundaries.

Alternatives
Outsourcing does not have to be a negative word.  Whether you sell a tangible product or a service, you probably need some type of technology to market or manage your business. This need for technology means you need to have an individual or organization that can guide you through the waters, produce custom applications and support you from a technical aspect.  Whether you simply need a webmaster to create and maintain your website, or you need full application development, chances are you will quickly realize that hiring someone to work at your location is going to substantially impact your budget.  Your alternative to purchasing all of the hardware, software and furniture for this employee and paying salary and taxes to have this person in-house is to find a technology company to outsource to.  By outsourcing your technology department, you can potentially have several team members focusing on your needs vs. one, increasing the skill sets available to you while reducing overhead significantly.  I recommend that you find a local development group – local meaning within driving distance.  This team will be an extension of your own organization so get to know your outsource team and build a relationship with them in the same manner as you would if they were in-house employees.

Outsourcing Considerations
When choosing a team, keep in mind that you are hiring a department for your company.  The group needs to be trustworthy as they will be in control of sensitive data.  They should have long-standing relationships with their current client base.  They should have good communication, workflow and support infrastructure.  Since you will most likely be communicating with this team remotely, they should have video conferencing capabilities.  Make sure that a project manager will be assigned as a liaison, and that your communication is not directly with a developer.  Evaluate your service level agreement and software contract to avoid any confidentiality or intellectual property issues.

Conclusion
Outsourcing is actually a good idea in many cases, but it does not mean that it has to be overseas. Do your research when looking for the right team, and consider this group as an extension of your own staff. If you have any questions regarding the choice of outsourcing, please contact Peacock Production Studios.

E-mail: info@peacockproductionstudios.com

Website: http://peacockproductionstudios.com

Twitter: @peacockstudios

Facebook: Peacock Production Studios

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