How do you QA websites?

Question

I am wondering if there is a detailed list of tools/practices that can be used to QA websites. The tools that seem to get most mention are link checkers, validators and Selenium IDE. In my capacity, only the link checker and validator seem to work well. I'm not a QA specialist, so I don't know what it is that they do and want to be more informed about this topic.

Answer 1

If you are truly interested in learning more about the QA process for websites, you might want to reach out and find an actual QA person to sit with. There is a lot more to proper QA than simply knowing what tools are being used, a lot of it comes down to what, how, why, and when you are doing the testing. There are a number of methodologies that one can take, and those all play into what tools are used and how they are used.

Answer 2

There are numerous resources to get you started in testing. I suggest doing a little reading offline and online. One great testing book is How to Break Software, by James Whittaker. He's also got a follow up book that I am currently reading How to Break Software Security.

More important than the tools you use and the technology of the target application (web, java, c#, ...) is your approach to testing. What are the requirements of your system? What is it supposed to do? What is it not supposed to do? Start with these broad questions and use them to drill down into more specifics like Should the FizzBuzz module allow duplicate entries?

You cannot just jump directly into test tooling, as they are just tools, and without the right testing approach, they could do more harm than good.