BBC Homepage testing strategy

by Jamie Lentin on May 02, 2012
Process Analysis and Automated Testing

We spent 3 months embedded in the BBC Search, Navigation and Homepage department, during which we:

  • Formalised a testing / QA process that is fluid as possible, ensuring
    • Manual test plans: Test plans that walk QA staff through all aspects of the site that will grow as new work is added.
    • Prioritised mobile testing: Instead of testing equally on over 20 mobile devices, we used site statistics and research to narrow this down to 5 P1 mobiles and a selection P2 mobiles, as well as other tools such as emulators and desktop equivalents to aid the testing process.
  • Tools to automate as much of the release process as possible.
  • An automated test suite using Cucumber & Capybara to bootstrap the team into a Behaviour-Driven-Development style of working. This covered all major functionality of the homepage at present

We undertook and documented this work using the BBC's tools of Confluence, Subversion and Jira.