Importance of Maintaining a Best Practices Checklist in Web Development
It is important that we test all the functionalities for possible bug or error on the websites we are developing and maintaining. To discover these bugs, we need to do a regression test in every work. Many of us developers, since we are so focused on getting the code to work, more often we forget to check our work or test it because some bugs are too intractable for us developers and many times bugs are showing in the live sites that cause clients to be frustrated. To maintain customer satisfaction, we need to make sure that our work is very precise.
At Portal Integrators, we do the best practices checklist to ensure that we do not forget tasks. We emphasize that the checklist, not just a list we blow through. The checklist is the most crucial part of development for us. Some programmers might consider it the most “boring” part of development because it is all about testing and finding issues in others’ work and that it is a no-brainer task, but we think it is the most dangerous part. It is the last part of the development in wider the development is done when the work passed our checklist. It is like the quality assurance checking in our team. We perform as a team. We always render time to check others’ work to make sure it maintains a good quality. We do the following items in our checklist to keep the quality of the site.
Performance and Functionality, of a possible crash or bug in our development and site maintenance. We make sure that all existing functionalities are working and if ever there is ever a new feature that has been added, it would not be in conflict with the existing features. We check the broken links and images and duplicate contents of the site so that the site will have a high grade in SEO and that users will have a smooth experience when visiting the site. We also check the site responsiveness to make sure that it is rendering on any platform and devices.
Traffic, we always check the latest traffic of the website so that we have an idea on the total number of visitors to the site. Doing this gives us an idea of whether we need to improve on something in the site or if whatever change is done affects the site.
Security, the most important is the safety and security of the site. We check all possible security updates and vulnerabilities. We always create backups for the possible crash, and we always update our site to the have the latest security features.
Testing does not have an ending until the site is free from any bugs. Even though it might be considered the most “boring” part of the development, we need to perform the best practices checklist to provide the best quality of work.
Maintaining Quality
Having a Best Practices Checklist will ensure that the sites we are maintaining are always in good working order and in the best quality to be delivered to the client.
Easier Bug Tracing
The Best Practices Checklist will help in tracing bugs since we know when there have been changes done to the code and which change possibly caused the error or bug.
Peace of Mind
Having backups on a daily basis is part of the Best Practices Checklist, so in case of crashes or attacks, we can easily restore the site.