Quality Assurance

My (Current) Favorite QA Tools

By:

Alexandra Ponce

on 6/23/2020

Quality assurance testing is a crucial step in building and launching a website. It ensures an experience that is accessible, intuitive, and functional. It requires great attention to detail and can be time-consuming depending on the complexity of the website.

However, QA testing doesn’t end once a website is launched — it’s an ongoing process that should continue as website content is updated. Although this process can become quite tedious, there are plenty of tools out there that can help automate and streamline the process. Here are a few of my favorite QA tools at the moment.

Trello

Quality assurance testing sometimes requires a lot of back-and-forth between designers, developers, and QA folks. Trello is a web-based task management tool that we use to keep feedback and ideas organized all in one place. It follows the Kanban method, which is a workflow management method designed to help visualize work to be done. The basic idea is that you create a board designated to a specific project, fill the board with lists (think to-do lists), and then you create “cards” within those lists that represent the work that needs to be done. You can then drag the cards to the relevant list.

Check out the example below:

My favorite thing about Trello is that it can be used for all types of projects. I highly recommend it for anyone who needs a little bit of help staying organized.

Siteimprove Accessibility Checker

The Siteimprove Accessibility checker is a free Chrome extension I use for nearly every website I test. All I have to do is click the Siteimprove icon in my browser (I prefer Google Chrome) and it will scan the entire page to identify any potential accessibility concerns.

Here’s an example of the accessibility checker in action:

Bonus: You can filter results by the level of WCAG 2.0 conformance.

Scrutiny 9

This is my go-to tool when I’m tasked with scanning websites for broken links. It’s super easy to use. You enter the URL of the website you’re scanning, adjust the settings to your preference, and hit the Scan Now button. Within minutes, the tool scans every page on a website for broken links, mixed content, and more.

The only downside is that the newest version (v9 4.4) isn’t free like previous versions. However, I’d say it’s worth the money considering all of the features it includes.

Any other tools we should know about? Let us know!

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