The Little Book of Website Quality Control

The Great Website Quality Control Rundown

When you think about the quality of websites, what comes to your mind? How would you test—and what would you test for? Take a moment to ponder this question.

We should readily recall some tools and tests known to us from our everyday work. Some of us might remember validators; some might think of linters; and for others, security suites pop into their minds.

What do we test for? Not only spec compliance as with validation, or code formatting with linters, we can—and should, as professionals—test for everything we can get our hands on. Going through what we can get our hands on and showing what tools we have at our disposal is the purpose of this section. For each area, in descending order of importance, we’ll go over why quality control matters and look at available tools and automation options.

The tools are mostly web-based; applications have been left out, and exceptions noted. The idea was not to shoulder the probably impossible task of listing and evaluating all tools, but to give the interested reader a starting point to evaluate production sites instantly. (Note that despite all diligence exercised in retrieving and evaluating these tools, neither the author nor O’Reilly Media assumes responsibility for the usefulness, reliability, or accuracy of the tools listed.)

Security

Security can be considered the most important thing to test for because whatever it is we and our users are doing, if the security of it is compromised, we ...