Transcript MS Powerpoint 97/2000 format

QA For Web Sites
Marieke Guy
UKOLN
University of Bath
[email protected]
Ed Bremner
TASI/ILRT
University of Bristol
[email protected]
Brian Kelly
UKOLN
University of Bath
[email protected]
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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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An Introduction to QA
What is Quality?Assurance?
“Quality is the ability of your product to be
able to satisfy your users”
“Quality assurance is the process that
demonstrates your product is able to
satisfy your users”
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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’
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 nocompliance
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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!
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
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
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
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
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
High Quality Product
• On-going QA
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QA for Digitisation
…If you don’t capture quality…
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
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Guidelines
We often say:
• Open standards are important
• HTML, XML, XHTML, CSS, … are important
but fail to explain why and how
JISC’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 procedures
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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 service
The 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
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
small number
AAsmall
numberof
sites
could not
ofWeb
Web
sites
be transformed.
were not in the
Analysis of HTTP
Internet
headers Archive
indicated
due
that to
thisthe
was due to
robots.txt
incorrect HTTP file.
headers.
We
will need to
We will need
to in
provide
advice
provide
advice in
this
area.
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
Tidy
(online)
Virtual
XHTML
resource
Visualisation
& validation
of DC
RDF
Validator
HTML
resource
Original page,
containing
embedded
DC metadata
XSLT
extraction
of DC
DC
in RDF
format
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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 resources
In 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
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Documentation: Case Studies
Case Studies are
being commissioned
These 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 Deliverables
We 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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