Link: Authoring Style Guide

https://github.com/tooling/authoring-styleguide Some good guidelines for technical writing. Via http://labnotes.org/weekend-reading-500-feet-in-the-air/

Link: Browser stats for Q4

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2014/01/browser_stats_f_7.html Some general trends in web browser usage – keeping an eye on this can help you make decisions on where to focus your development and QA efforts in the absence of more specific information for your audience. Curious to see how big mobile usage is in Nigeria and India. Definitely something to keep in […]

Link: Estimated reading time in web design

http://briancray.com/posts/estimated-reading-time-web-design Interesting how a little detail can have such a big effect. An example of how setting expectations can have a big benefit. Showing an estimated time improved time on site by 13.8%. What's more interesting though—people either followed me, subscribed to my blog, or retweeted my articles 66.7% more often. Via http://labnotes.org/weekend-reading-500-feet-in-the-air/

Link: The Art of Test Team Management and Motivation

http://www.softed.com/Resources/Docs/TestTeamManagement.pdf An older document but with some good guidelines about managing a team of testers. Some excerpts: Guide your team to align with the project objectives …However, if testers believe they will be blamed for the quality of the software, they tend to develop a risk-averse approach, adopting a position of quality guardians, becoming rather […]

How do you do Quality Assurance when you don’t have a dedicated QA staff?

Companies that are small or just getting started often don’t have a dedicated staff for doing Quality Assurance. This doesn’t mean that you have to release buggy applications. There are a few things that you can do to provide some basic QA that will benefit your product.

Link: “Get Ready For Tester Experience”

http://blog.smartbear.com/testing/get-ready-for-tx-tester-experience/ Puts TX (Tester Experience) on the same level as UX and DX (Developer Experience). Making it easier for testers to do their job and making them a core part of the entire initiative (including requirements and design) makes for better test results and a better product.

Effective JavaScript Organization for Small-Scale Sites

There is a lot of discussion online about organizing JavaScript into modules with lazy-load capabilities and auto-require chains. This level of organization can be very valuable in web applications and even in large scale web sites – but in many websites solutions like Require.js are simply too much and introduce a level of complexity that […]

Improving the Performance of your Website

Having a fast website is important for both SEO and User Experience (UX). If a site is too slow to load, people are more likely to move on to something else. This is a short list of fairly easy activities that can be accomplished by any competent web developer which will have a major impact […]

Site Launch QA Checklist

11* things you should check during your next site launch. Search Engines are not being blocked – be sure to check basic authentication, robots.txt, and meta tags. There are no broken links – you should run broken link scans before launch as well but sometimes broken links are difficult to identify during final pre-launch QA […]

Update Feature Flags with Capistrano and Rake

After you have feature flags setup in your app, you’re likely to want to enable/disable them easily. Frequently this is done on more of an ad-hoc basis and doesn’t necessarily warrant an interface from within your app. This sort of ad-hoc activity is a good match for Rake and Capistrano.