The Relevance of Content Functional Testing for Websites
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For any website or content intense software, content is very important. E-Learning software, has to be thorough with its content else its effectiveness will be drastically reduced. What if a grammar book contains grammatical mistakes? The reader loses confidence in both the book and the author or worse; thinks that the grammar in the book is correct and learns the incorrect grammar. This makes content testing equally important as content writing.
Because of time consuming character of building base software or website, content testing is problematic for content intensive software or websites. But content functional testing is important as developers tend to overlook mistakes in the content. Outsourcing worsens it as developers from one country may not be familiar with the language of another. There are two ways of content testing; either test the content yourself or have the content functional testing outsourced. The choice depends on the availability of time, resources and money.
The main parameters of content testing are navigability, relevance, formatting and typo. If content says “more” below and when you click on it, it should take you to the extended version of the same. If you find any other article instead of the same then you will lose interest in the webpage or software. The same holds for other links, audio/video files attached with the content. They need to be thoroughly tested by proper functional testing services.
The logos, banners should also be in context with the content. You would not like to see the banner of ABC Company when the content is talking about Google. Similarly downloadable contents like PDFs & PowerPoint presentations should hold relevance with the content. The headings/chapter names in the parent content and the downloadable contents should be similar to what they are talking about. If content testing finds that there are tables in content, then the format, along with the relevance and placement of the tables should be tested. You would not like to see a table related to stock prices of a company in a content related to demographics of a country.
When the software is a quiz or something similar then content functional testing becomes more important as the answers to the quiz will hold importance in marking the person who is taking the quiz. And if the results are being judged for some important outcome then the questions and answers of the quiz should be tested thoroughly. The answers should be matched against an answer key to see if the quiz registers the responses and generates the reports correctly.
Reports generated from software give significant outcomes of the activity done. Incorrectly generated reports are to be interpreted incorrectly. Functional testing service must look through the reports for discrepancies. Consider this: A feedback system generates a report giving a grade to students related to the feedback given by their teachers. Now if the grade column shifts upwards by a row then the whole feedback report becomes inconsistent and the report will be incorrect. Content testing irons out these problems.
After all these tests, proof reading is the most important part where the flow of the content is checked. All the links etc. may be consistent but if the language is not according to the taste of the reader or if it reflects some derogatory comments towards some group then it may be counterproductive to launch such a product.
Content functional testing removes these problems and increases the product’s worth by delivering high quality content to the readers. While the above form some of the core elements of content functional testing, testing of content itself is a completely different ball-game which requires domain expertise. This continues to be an area of discussion as to whether content needs to be tested for or should we rely on SMEs expertise and the content they have created.
About the Author
Rajini Padmanaban has expertise in content testing and software testing services. He wrote many articles on these topics that are insightful and consist of valuable information for readers.
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