QA Checklist

Quality Assurance can make or break your business.

We run through the following quality checks before deployment of a new web solution. In the spirit of guiding documents like that of The Checklist Manifesto, we want to get it right the first time; thus, we choose to make these mundane tasks as explicit and comprehensive as possible due to the complexity and error-prone nature of web software development.

Front-End Checklist

Replacement of “filler” content with production-ready content
Links are all intact
Website is free of visual or Javascript errors in: Internet Explorer 7,8,9; Firefox (latest); Chrome (latest); Safari (latest); on latest Mac and PC platforms
Proper spacing between paragraphs
Proper spacing between navigational menu items
Dropdown menus behave correctly
Header sizes are consistent
Link color and other attributes are consistent
Images are optimized with highest possible compression with acceptable decrease in quality
Contact emails, phone numbers, etc are all updated to production-ready content
Media gallery names, descriptions, and tags are populated for each item

Back-End Checklist

User sessions, log-in, and log-out functionality work appropriately and securely
Web-server page redirects from old linked URLs to new URLs (redesigns only)
HTTP accelerator or static-file view caching is active
HTTP expires headers to facilitate client-side caching are appropriately applied
Web forms validate correctly; administrative submission logic works as expected
Concurrent request capacity of servers is tested and appropriate for web traffic goal
Page load times are appropriately ranked on Google PageSpeed
Security:
- Operating system and relevant software packages are latest stable versions
- Operating system users and privileges are kept minimal
- Firewall allowances are minimal (eg, inbound ports are closed except for requisite inter-component communications)
- Database system users host-bound (no wildcard hosts) and privileges are kept minimal
- Sensitive application data (eg, passwords) are stored using one-way encryption
- Server software configuration forbids direct viewing of the filesystem
- Server-side script is configured with production-ready error and exception handling