Different Facets of Testing Web Applications (and Facebook bugs)

Web UI bug # 1: An empty space for suggested friends.

With an exponential growth in web applications combined with the ease of accessibility via smart devices, it is important to maintain rigorous quality standards. A trivial bug on your website can take away the “wow” experience from your users and divert them to the competitors. Any team responsible for driving the testing of web products should be able to differentiate the different facets of web app testing:

1. Web User Interface Testing
2. Web Usability Testing
3. Web application Testing

Though all three might end up having a sub set of shared test cases but all of them need to have their own release checklists. For example, Web User Interface Testing checklist could include:

1. Colors – hyperlinks color standard, field backgrounds and page background color to be distraction free.
2. Contents – uniform font size, uniform content when switching between previous and new pages, text alignment, text cases.
3. Images – graphics properly aligned, graphics optimized to load, text wrapping around the image.
4. Instructions – tool tips, activity progress messages
5. Navigation – scroll bars, pop up message buttons – Cancel/OK, Link to home page on every page, keyboard enabled
6. Look and Feel – consistent across all the pages

Here is an example of Web UI bugs from my recent browsing experience of Facebook:

Web UI bug # 2: SORT text misaligned