8 Tips for Effective Quality Assurance

You have a shiny new website that’s nearly complete. Before launching it, make sure all the kinks have been smoothed out. This is a crucial first step. Enter quality assurance (QA)!

Quality assurance is an important phase to make sure your site functions correctly. It includes quite a bit of testing, fixing bugs, and testing again.

8 Important Things for an Effective QA Process

Whether you’re a project manager leading QA or a client scouting for bugs, these tips will help.

1. Open communication rules everything. Establish connections early on, and remember—inefficient communication is just as bad as no communication at all. At WDG, we use Basecamp as the central hub for all client communication.
2. If you have a question, ask it. There’s no point trying to fix something you don’t understand or need clarification on, just to have to do it again.
3. Take time to organize your tasks. It’s time-consuming, yes. But it’ll help you have a better sense of what you need to accomplish. We use Asana to keep our team organized on all of our projects.
4. You’ll spend a lot of time making changes yourself. This is a great opportunity to learn about the CMS you’re using, which will help you explain processes to the client!
5. Give yourself plenty of time to go through every section with a fine-toothed comb. Rushing leads to mistakes, which leads to unhappy clients.
6. Understand the technical scope and limitations of the website you are QA-ing. If a client asks for a new feature, for instance, is it actually in scope for development? Is the site even structured to handle the feature?
7. If you make a mistake, own up to it. Sometimes you’ll miss details, it happens (still—see #5). But the absolute worse thing you can do is make excuses.
8. Seek feedback. Asking your clients if you can improve anything during QA will encourage the transparency that is so necessary in this phase.

At the end of the day, successful website projects are all about clear and open communication between the parties involved. Want to start a conversation about what we can do for you? Get in touch—we’re here to answer your questions!