The Little Book of Website Quality Control

Introduction

There’s always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.

Colonel Pickering, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

What is a good website? For us web professionals, this is a most important question. Building good websites is part of our professional ethics, stemming from a code of honor that asserts that we can be professionals only if our work is good.

But how do we know that our work—that our websites—are good? Many criteria and examinations come to mind, but there is actually an entire field dedicated to informing us: quality management.

Quality management, which can be broken down into quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement, comes with a host of methods to not just identify (control) and fix (improvement) defects, but to avoid them systematically (planning, assurance).

This little book, which is the third in a series of books that cover important components of modern web development (after web frameworks and coding standards), focuses mostly on the quality control piece, for if we can’t “see” what’s wrong, we won’t fix or plan to avoid what’s wrong. Still, it’s going to share advice on how to tie quality to our processes, for it is more useful to learn how to fish than to hope to be fed every day. The book will do all of this in a loose and relaxed manner, however, and not to the extent ISO standards would cover quality.

Finally, and although this should matter ...