Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
and you should definitely send your microsites through one as
well. Although some microsites can be very small and live up to
their namesake, some of them can be very deceivingly wide
and involved. Generally, common sense tells us that the wider and
more involved something is, the more potential it has to be proble-
matic for us. You could carry that thought over to your microsites
and say that the more pages, sections, and functionalities it has,
the more chances there are that you
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ll come across some errors
and bugs.
Because your microsite is most likely larger than your banners,
it will require more time for the quality control person to test it.
There are pages to click through, scenarios to enact, and generally
much more for them to try to make it break. So I ask you this:
Should they (a) wait until you are completely finished before they
start testing, or (b) test while you are working on it? The best
answer here is (b). For the best results on that answer, you
ll
need to keep in close contact with the quality control person the
entire time you
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re working on the site. The general idea is that
you do several builds in succession of one another. Your first
build might consist of as little as the navigation menu. Have qual-
ity control make sure that they can
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t break the navigation and
also let them know it
s working by placing a dynamic text field on
the stage to tell them what section they just clicked on. From
there, you add more and more to the site until you have it
entirely built out. The advantage here is that quality control can
inform you of bugs before they become a part of a larger problem.
Now, to avoid the fact that they can
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t really test something that
you keep changing while you
ll need to set up
two environments: the development environment and the staging
environment.
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re working, you
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TIP
When working with gradual builds of a site for quality control, be sure to
let them know of any issues you are already aware of and working on.
Also let them know of parts of the site that are in progress and will prob-
ably break. This will keep quality control from spending time on nonbugs,
and it will also keep you from having to sift them out.
Development Environment
The development (dev) environment is where you
ll do most of
your own testing and work on your microsites. The environment
for each site will differ according to the site itself and the dev ser-
vershouldbesetupexactlyhowtheliveserverwillbe.Ifthefinal
live site will be using Linux, Ruby on Rails, and a MySQL database,
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