Many Ways to Ensure Quality Work

At CMD, every digital product we release is subject to quality assurance (QA) testing. Why? We are committed to creating great work for our clients. Our specialists even have quality in their titles!

For QA testers, it’s all in the details: we identify use cases based on business requirements, UX wireframes, design comps and scripts. Testing against these use cases helps ensure the code works as intended, is reliable and secure, and is impacting business results for clients.

Much of the testing we do is manual: People look at the work, click links, and map back to the use cases. Manual testing is flexible and efficient, which pairs well with the quick-turn, deadline-driven, integrated deliveries of an agency. As testers check off use cases, their exploration and probing can reveal elusive design or development to be cleaned up prior to deployment.

More-complex, longer-life properties may benefit from automated testing: Custom scripts can speed regression testing in large-scale apps or feature-rich websites. We often use Selenium WebDriver for mimicking user interactions within web applications. This allows us to go quickly through a wide array of languages and common browsers.

Where manual testing gets nuanced results, it may be slow. Automated testing can set up a larger array of tests, but is more costly to design and code the testing scripts. But they’re not the only options. A tool that sometimes fits between manual testing and custom automation is Wraith, a tool that takes screenshots and sets an automated comparison between two instances of an app.

For instance, it can compare pages on a staging site with the same pages on production so that yesterday’s pages can be compared with today’s. This provides a low-overhead way to double-check that changes to the code base, server configurations, or CMS haven’t broken pages. And that a deployment hasn’t resulted in unexpected changes. This narrows the focus of testing so that only changes requiring human validation are manual.

For each client project, we use the best combination of tools to map cost to quality output, because every project deserves the best approach to ensure our work goes beyond our clients’ expectations.

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