The Why & How To Create A Front-End Website Testing Plan

Undoubtedly, weak testing phase is going to impact SDLC — and clients may change the perception and place lesser importance in future services. With all the constraints, you need to worry about company reputation. If you want to foster growth, you need to uphold principles, find out and innovate plans methodically.

Sign-off from the client is not the end of the journey, if something happens down the line, even at a later stage, when your product has reached the end users, certainly you are going to hear the repercussion of an endless echo.

For an authentic front-end testing plan for a website, functionality and performance have to be checked on different devices and browsers (with multiple versions). The process of evaluating your website over different browsers, browser versions, and operating systems is called cross browser testing & is considered a vital part of every front-end website testing plan for having an estimate on the audience you are able to please with a seamless UI & UX. A master front-end testing plan should incorporate precautions required to reduce time, effort, and money.

Why You Must Execute Front-End Testing?

Here, I will draw some highlight on the necessity of front-end testing.

Frameworks Introduced Complexity

In the past, developers observed a shift with the evolution of frameworks like React and Angular which also introduced complexity. Javascript swiftly reached the top. Although gaining momentum across different applications, there are so many libraries and frameworks to wrap your head around.

Along with it, client-side development coupled with browsers might experience unexpected result due to modifications in rendering engines of browsers. Leading to browser compatibility issues & an unpleasant user journey. Therefore, front-end testing plan comes as a necessity for making sure that your website renders the same across different browsers. Performing browser compatibility testing can help you with that area.

3rd Party Services

Front-end optimizations face challenges when you rely on 3rd party services, especially when you run ad networks. Integrated via javascript, these services with a poor performing script forces you to lose your control over the website. With the increasing popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS), you are bound to deal with 3rd party services and encounter challenges that will happen to arise during a project life cycle. Thus, it becomes indispensable to devise a front-end testing plan based on the 3rd party applications you are planning to integrate with for rendering your website.

Internet — An Unforgiving Place

The internet has become an unforgiving place and kids and seniors are also on board. Various countries are giving free Wi-Fi spots across many places where people can access the net without any username and password. That means even a single subtle error on a front end is going to be noticed & may affect your branding in a manner far worse than you can imagine. Even a small typo error could end up being trolled back at your organization. Especially, if you are in a competent market then your competitors will keep an eye out on your product. There is a good chance they may notice your flaws before others do! So to perform website front-end testing becomes a vital task, where you can’t afford to turn a blind eye towards any aspect.

How Do We Plan A Front-end Testing Plan?

I am sure by far, we realize the relevance of devising a well organized front-end testing that covers all your website has to offer on UI & UX. Now, the next major question that arises is How? How can you create an excellent front-end testing plan?

Don’t worry, I will be addressing all the key points to keep in mind for developing a master front-end testing plan. But before we do that, we need to understand the major pain points to consider.

Time & Budget, Usually Both Hinder The Testing Process

Designers and developers converge together to turn a design into reality via code. But what is the point if it isn’t presented well in front of your website visitors? I have seen it very often in agile that teams are more focused on deploying the next update, paying less attention to what they already have due to narrow time windows. Time can be a major constraint for executing front-end testing plan because there is a lot that you need to cover.

Front-end testing or graphical user interface testing must ensure you are using a defect-free

updated front-end. Would you make a number entry in name field? A bundle of small issues in browsers can trip your reputation off. That is why a strong front-end testing plan should be made considering different individual skills possessed by your teammates.

All the “reasons responsible for high severity or critical defects” identified at early stages: design phases or requirement gathering, will prevent future obstacles in a front-end testing plan of a website such as:

• Eventually testing process being extended at last.
• Missing of deadlines.
• Dropping the idea or removing an important feature due to an aggregation of defects in an unprecedented manner.
• The situation going out of control in highly limited time.

For instance, let’s consider performing cross browser testing. You have a perfectly developed website but you are targeting a global audience and people visiting your website can be from any browser or any desktop or mobile device. Now, the aesthetic design is going to encounter an innumerable combination of OS and browsers. Evaluating your website over hundreds or maybe thousands of browsers could be very tricky, strenuous, and time-consuming.

In such cases, you could go for device labs that will allocate you real devices to test your website at, but most people won’t find it affordable. The other option is to go for simulator & emulators to create your own virtual testing environment. However, that would require a considerable amount of effort in setting hundreds of browser + OS combinations. Fortunately, we have the power of cloud, and there are cloud-based cross browser testing tools such as LambdaTest which could help you test your website on over 2000+ browsers, & browser versions without any setup on your local machine.

Preparing Checklist For A Front-End Testing Plan

For a Front-end website development, a checklist incorporated during the construction phase cease all burnouts at later stages — and make the end result more sustainable and stable.

Team cohesion and a sense of belonging can kill the wastage of time at the initial level. That means that: the door of testing opens from the very first phase of development.

Front-end testing plan checklist will help starters or seniors to analyse, understand, and maintain a basic set of guidelines and ensuring web product’s quality from the very beginning till the very end. Enlisted information will help a designer as well as a developer.

• To check the validity of the document, visit the W3C’s validation service. One of the peers could have missed closing a < div > tag. Validation is an inevitable process. It should avoid a lot of back and forth during a testing process.
• The first thing declaration is responsible for a cleanly rendered website. It triggers a standard rendering mode by giving instruction to browser about the version of markup language. In an HTML document, it should be the very first thing, and if not included, the browser may assume a different language and causing to render incorrectly.

• No CSS Reset: Yahoo and Eric Meyer are actively using CSS Reset stylesheet which is used to maintain consistency across the browser. Skipping CSS reset reinforces you to declare much more if you don’t want browsers to show things differently. Commonly used CSS reset:

1. Normalize.css
2. HTML5Reset
3. Eric Meyers CSS Reset

• You’ll use IDs and they must be “unique, easy, and intelligent”!
• Do you have SEO in mind? Search Engine Optimization is very critical to help your website Google SERP(Search Engine Result Pages). You may not have spent enough attention on best practices around SEO, keep up with new rules, understanding good content, keywords, image alt tags, meta-data, site map, intelligent backlinking, elimination of duplicate content, load times, and suitable crawlable site architecture. Are your using Semantic HTML & RWD(Responsive Web Design) to help your website load faster and better on mobile devices. If you are not, then be ready to experience a downside on the SEO front.
• Visual interfaces for desktop, mobile, and browsers definitely create a buzz among web professionals. As a best practice, you must always begin with a mobile layout, and only then should you move up to the desktop layout.
• Try to collect all time-saving techniques one of them is version control that helps you to maintain code modification record . Commonly used version control systems are GIT and SVN.
• CSS at the top of the HTML document’s header — improves progressive enhancement & cross browser compatibility, and blocks a glimpse(bug) of unstyled text.
• It is important to practice where and how to add your scripts to improve and influence the loading time. Browser constructs DOM and CSSOM by fetching HTML and CSS respectively. You would not like the browser to wait till JavaScript gets resolved. So put the scripts at bottom (before closing the body tag). Use “defer and async” in HTML attributes to allow downloading of scripts asynchronously. In practice generally, use defer. “defer” allows execution right after DOM is built whereas “async” gets executed in causal order(when available). “defer” follows the order in which scripts are defined in the script.

• External CSS and Javascript result in faster pages as they get cached by the browser.
• Minification reduces the file size by removing unnecessary characters. Minification improves the response time and removes the following items:

1. Whitespace characters
2. Comments
3. Line breaks
4. Block delimiters

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