I’m into quality assurance and user experience. Really into them, to the point that I find myself looking at websites in terms of personas and obsessively running tests in jMeter, to the point that it looks like my IP has been used to DOS…my own website. So now, take a look at the picture to the right, specifically the first sentence:

Please don’t hesitate to use the form to the right to contact me at any time.

Not a bad sentence except for one critical problem. That is in the right column and the contact form is to the left. I am 34 years old, I consider myself reasonably intelligent/well read, and I screwed up left versus right. Pretty embarrassing, to the point that, if I were really concerned about my personal brand, I would change it and delete all evidence of my little screw-up.

But, I won’t do that, rather I am going to use this mistake to make a very important point. It does not matter how good your process is, or how good your tools are. You need an outsider (or hopefully outsiders) to QA your sites before you put them online!!

This post’s Flickr photo was taken by a photographer named KLDSRF. Definitely a great shot of an interesting looking bridge!

Test Purpose:

To see what would happen to this site if it suddenly got hit with a wave of traffic. I am looking for two things – evidence that my system would get close to crashing and evidence that my system would slow down to the point it would no longer be usable.

Test Tools:

JMeter 2.3.4
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This post’s Flickr gem was taken by a photographer named Campanero Rumbero. It is a beautiful shot, taken in Lorraine, France.

Whenever I am testing a site, I like to arm myself with the absolute best tools for the job. I have tested a large number of sites, so I have come up with a few indispensable tools that I bring into every single project I face. Not only are these tools great for quality assurance, they are also wonderful development tools.

As a huge bonus, all of these tools are free. So read the article, then get out there and try them out!

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The great summer shot to the right is by a photographer named Mootoh.

I don’t know about you, but I find launching a new website rather stressful. Not only am I about to find out (in brutal honesty) just how well my site scales, I’m also (inevitably) going to find out about some weird bugs. However, over a number of new site launches, I have found some great tools and methods that help minimize the weird bugs (and sleepless nights).

Since I will be launching my home page shortly, I thought that this presented an excellent opportunity to document my pre launch testing procedures. So, I am going to write a series of posts about some of the tools I use, the methods that I follow, and the little things that I look for when I about to launch a site.

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