QUALITY ASSURANCE PLAN GUIDELINES

Map your customers’ experience. How? Fire up your browser and pretend you’re a customer. Walk through the customer’s complete shopping experience — run numerous tests from the moment your customer first enters your site through the last step of entering payment information and shipping preferences.

• Test the website’s ordering process, from the user’s point of entry through to the shipping preference.
• Test the credit card verification system, as well as the billing system that comes afterward.
• Stress test all of the servers with simulated loads.
• Check the website’s impact on any back-end systems.
• Test not only the servers, but also the personnel and processes that support the systems.
• Test email response times.
• Test customer usability through focus groups or random-sample surveys.

Test the offline side. How is the payment information received, verified and processed, including the receipt of payment into your bank account?

Test your servers using simulated loads to see how they stand up under the stress of heavy traffic. In addition to the products listed earlier, look into:

RSW e-Load (www.rswsoftware.com), a component of Empirix’s e-Test Suite, is the easy way to test the scalability of a website running on Windows NT. RSW offers a 30-day free trial. You can use e-Load early in your website’s development process to validate the scalability of the overall architecture and to avoid costly rework later. It can also be used to test and to tune your completed website under load prior to deployment. e-Load utilizes the Visual Scripts to emulate thousands of “Virtual Users.” You can change the number and type of users on-the-fly to try “what-if” scenarios as you vary the loading conditions or application settings. Also e-Load’s integrated real-time graphics and reporting capabilities allow for easy interpretation of the testing results.

Facilita Software Development’s Forecast (www.facilita.co.uk) is a non-intrusive web server load testing tool that simulates users on a system. It allows you to perform extensive and realistic load testing before a system goes live. It supports the UNIX family — Solaris, AIX, SCO, Digital UNIX, and Linux, along with Windows NT.

Software Research, Inc’s Testworks/Web (www.testworks.com) allows you to ensure the quality and reliability of your web pages prior to publication. Components included in TestWorks/Web, such as the XVirtual tool, can simulate thousands of hits against your website by fabricating hundreds of synthetic interacting users, thereby helping you to assure 100% load accuracy. You can run the product on most UNIX and Windows systems.

Now, test your website’s integration with your offline business systems such as your in-house database, accounting, inventory management system, etc. by simulating numerous transactions. In doing this you’re not only checking out the hardware and software but you’re also testing your personnel and the entire process that supports your website.

Last, but not least, check your customer service processes by testing your email response time, your web-based call center, etc.

Never launch an e-commerce site, or make a site change or enhancement without solid quality assurance. A month of intensive, structured testing is the minimum for a large-scale e-commerce site.