How do you perform functionality testing for your eLearning on multiple browsers/OS?
Feb 23, 2015
Hi folks - I am curious about how your organization or company handles functionality testing for your developed eLearning products.
Once you have identified what browsers, operating systems, and devices you are supporting - how do you go about testing all of these various scenarios?
Do you hand off your content to an established tester outside of the Design team?
When doing testing, what resources do you rely on to accurately test?
We have been attempting to use BrowserStack is a viable option to test various operating systems, browsers, and devices but find that the simulated BrowserStack environment is not as customizable as we would like (e.g. uninstalling plugins like Flash). Additionally we note that using BrowserStack to test audiovisual content is not viable due to the remote connection and presents playback issues that are NOT present in actual environment.
I would love to hear about tools/websites/resources you use and how you do your testing!
Thank you!
2 Replies
Hi Taylor -
What I've seen work best is to establish a checklist of items to test and a testing protocol (what order to test things in).
As for platforms, it's tough sometimes to find all of the platforms you'll need to test. The best I've found is through local virtualization. I use VM Ware and Microsoft offers pre-configured virtual machines that provide a specific configuration of browser and OS.
This should have you covered for just about any flavor of IE you can think of.
https://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools
Each VM is quite large. VMWare Player runs around $120. VirtualBox is free. These are great once you get them running since it's relatively fast to switch between configurations and you can simulate practically any desktop PC configuration.
Thank you very much for your feedback! Yes we do establish very specific testing plans based on the unique product being tested. We also keep analytics on which browsers/OS our customers are using and create our "test list" from there. It sounds like we are on the right path as far as that goes!
I appreciate the information about virtual machines, that was going to be my next recommendation to our group. I think the key here would be "local" virtualization because as we have experienced, using a virtual environment access thru VPN or remote connection actually just causes more problems.
Thank you very much again for your feedback!
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