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QA For Web Sites

Brian KellyUKOLNUniversity of BathB.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk

Marieke GuyUKOLNUniversity of BathM.Guy@ukoln.ac.uk

Ed BremnerTASI/ILRTUniversity of BristolEd.Bremner@bris.ac.uk

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QA For Web Sites

Aims Of Today’s Talk• To discuss some of the approaches currently taken to QA

• To summarise findings of surveys of Web sites

• To make recommendations for future QA work

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What is Quality?

“Quality is the ability of your product to be able to satisfy your users”

Assurance?

“Quality assurance is the process that demonstrates your product is able to satisfy your users”

An Introduction to QA

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An Introduction to QA

What does Quality Assurance give?• ‘Quality’ means your project is ‘useful’

and without ‘quality’ you have nothing• ‘Quality’ provides a future for project• But ‘quality assurance’ needs standards

to be meaningful• ‘Quality’ & ‘Best Practice’ can only be

considered in terms of being ‘Fit for Purpose’

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QA is the opportunity to learn!

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Approach Taken

Two possible approaches to ensuring compliance with standards and best practices:

Enforce• Inspect all project’s work• Strict auditing, with penalties for no-

compliance

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Approach Taken

Two possible approaches to ensuring compliance with standards and best practices:

Encourage• Train all project staff• Developmental, explaining reasons for

compliance, documenting examples of best practices and providing advice on implementation and monitoring

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Approach Taken

Two possible approaches to ensuring compliance with standards and best practices:

Enforce vs Encourage

QA Focus prefers to encourage!

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QA Focus - a JISC-funded project, formed to support a number of digital library development projects

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QA for Digitisation

Do it once…..do it right:

• Project is fundamentally dependent upon the quality of original product

• Quality is the pre-requisite to preservation

• Quality expectations will only grow

• Delivery problems can be fixed, but capture problems normally can’t

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QA for Digitisation

A multi-level approach may be taken to QA within the digitisation process:

• Strategic QA

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Carried out before digitisation starts

Research and establishing best practice & standards

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QA for Digitisation

A multi-level approach may be taken to QA within the digitisation process:

• Strategic QA

• Workflow QA

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Formative assessment, before & during development

Establishing & documenting workflow & processes

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QA for Digitisation

A multi-level approach may be taken to QA within the digitisation process:

• Strategic QA

• Workflow QA

• Sign-off QA

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Quality Control : Summative assurance at end of each process, providing an audit history for all QA work undertaken

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QA for Digitisation

A multi-level approach may be taken to QA within the digitisation process:

• Strategic QA

• Workflow QA

• Sign-off QA

• On-going QA

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Summative assurance as part of long term QA to establish a system to report, check & fix any faults found in future

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QA for Digitisation

QA Focus promotes a multi-level approach to digitisation:

• Strategic QA

• Workflow QA

• Sign-off QA

• On-going QA

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High Quality Product

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QA for Digitisation

…If you don’t capture quality…

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you can never deliver quality…

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QA For Web Sites

The issues:• The Web is the main delivery mechanism for

projects and services• There is an increasing awareness of the importance

of:• Accessibility• Use of new devices (PDAs, WAP, e-books, …)• Repurposing of Web content (e.g. archiving)

• Technologies such as XSLT will support repurposing … of valid XML resources

But:• Invalid HTML is the norm• Many authoring tools produce poor HTML• Authors aren’t aware of the problems MG

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Guidelines

We often say:• Open standards are important• HTML, XML, XHTML, CSS, … are important

but fail to explain why and howJISC’s QA Focus is addressing such concerns by:

• Documenting example of best practices in which projects can share their implementation successes (and difficulties they experienced)

• Provide brief advice in specific aspects of the standards and best practices

• Surveying its communities to highlight best practices and areas in which improvements can be made

• Demonstrating use of testing tools and proceduresMG

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Standards & Best Practices

Standards For Web:• Use compliant HTML / XHTML• Use CSS• Support WAI accessibility guidelines

Best Practices For Web:• Ensure Web resources can are suitable for

reuse and repurposing• Where proprietary formats need to be used,

flag them and use in most open way

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Surveying The Community

Surveys of project Web sites have been carried out in order to:

• Obtain a profile for the community• Identify examples of best practices• Identify areas in which further advice is needed

Surveys included:• HTML & CSS compliance Accessibility• 404 error pages HTTP headers• Repurposing resources

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Survey Philosophy

The surveys made use of freely-available Web-based tools:• Methodology is open • No software needs to be installed locally (apart from

Web browser)• Findings can be reproduced• Latest results can be obtained by clicking on link to

testing serviceThe surveys typically examined project entry points and not entire Web site as:

• This page has the highest profile• The aim is to validate a methodology which can be

deployed by projects themselves, not to test every page on behalf of the projects

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Survey Findings

Initial set of findings available from <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/surveys/web-10-2002/>

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Providing Motivation

We have found evidence of failure to comply with HTML standards

There is a need to explain why compliance is important (and avoid the “it’s OK in my browser” argument) and to provide motivation for projects to update their tools, authoring procedures, etc.

A further set of surveys look at repurposing of the project Web sites:

• Availability of Web sites in the Internet Archive• Ease of making Web sites available on a PDA• Transformation of embedded metadata

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Repurposing Resources

A small number of Web sites were not in the Internet Archive due to the robots.txt file.We will need to provide advice in this area.

We examined the Web sites to see if they were available in the Internet Archive and could be transformed into a format for viewing on a PDA

A small number of Web sites could not be transformed.

Analysis of HTTP headers indicated that this was due to incorrect HTTP headers.

We will need to provide advice in this area.

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Transforming Resources

Project entry points were processed by several online transformation services in order to validate and visualise embedded Dublin Core metadata

HTMLresource

Original page, containing embedded DC metadata

Tidy (online)

VirtualXHTMLresource

XSLT extraction

of DC

DC in RDFformat

Visualisation & validation

of DC

RDF Validator

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Providing Advice

We have:• Survey project Web sites and identified areas of lack

of compliance with standards and best practices • Demonstrated examples of the potential importance

of compliance for repurposing resourcesIn addition we need to provide:

• Brief focussed advice on the standards• Information on how to monitor compliance• Case studies on solutions deployed by projects

themselves• Guidance on dealing with implementation difficulties

and what to do when strict compliance is difficult to achieve

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Documentation: Advice

Advisory briefing documents are being produced

These are:• Brief, focussed

documents• Informed by

findings of the surveys

Advisory briefing documents are being produced

These are:• Brief, focussed

documents• Informed by

findings of the surveys

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Documentation: Case Studies

Case Studies are being commissionedThese are:

• Written by projects themselves

• Describe the solution adopted to a particular problem

• Include details of lessons learnt – not just a press release!

Case Studies are being commissionedThese are:

• Written by projects themselves

• Describe the solution adopted to a particular problem

• Include details of lessons learnt – not just a press release!

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Next Steps

Extended Coverage

We will be moving on from Web and digitisation to include other areas including:

• Metadata Multimedia• Software development Deployment into service• …

Moving On From Automated Testing

The initial work made use of automated testing tools:• Can be used remotely Objective• Applicable across all projects

We have started work on QA procedures in areas which are not suitable for automated checking

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Limitations

There are a number of limitations to the work we have carried out so far:

• Project Web sites have different purposes (information about the project; communications with project partners; project deliverables themselves; etc.)

• Projects have different levels of funding, resources, expertise, etc.

• Projects are at different stages of development (and some have finished)

The surveys are intended to demonstrate a methodology which projects can use for themselves

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Self Assessment Toolkit

Further DeliverablesWe will be developing a self-assessment toolkit for projects to use, by individual projects or across project clusters

The toolkit will consist of:• Examples of QA procedures• Documented examples of use of testing tools• Self-assessment questionnaires• Advice on standards and best practices• Case studies• FAQs• …

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Questions

Any questions?

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