This release sees the launch of the new Sites Beta. Add a site, then crawl the pages and carry out accessibility checks for each page!
Testing Manager has largely been an internal system for WebDepend, we've built and adapted it to our needs as a business in order to become more organised, more efficient and better equipped to do our best testing for customer projects.
Over time we've added features to help us work more effectively, allowing us to concentrate on testing. Testing Manager is our work scheduling system, it's our own bug tracker, it's a project management tool, it's our device register and it even has a simple CRM built into it.
With the last couple of releases we've steadily redesigned the customer facing sections and also opened up access to parts of Testing Manager that were off-limits to customers previously.
Now we're adding the first real 'tool' for customers (and our testers) to use and benefit from, we're calling it Sites.
This is an early release so it is strictly called Sites Beta but as of now it is possible to add a website, start a crawl of that website to retrieve page data and then carry out an accessibility check of each page.
To access Sites Beta you need to be a customer of WebDepend and have Sites Beta enabled for your organisation. If you are a customer and would like access, please contact us.
Once you have access you'll be able to add sites, the page crawl is currently set to 10 pages maximum for this early release stage.
The page crawl currently retrieves page titles, descriptions, favicons and full page screenshots and will be extended soon to check for errors and many other aspects.
With one of our customers using Sites it was really easy to spot which pages had missing meta descriptions and some obvious duplicated pages, issues that our client can put right straightaway.
Once the pages are retrieved it is possible to start an accessibility check for each page, which uses WebAIM's excellent Wave API to check the page and return accessibility results.
This is an early launch, I think that much is clear, and will be expanded upon in the next few releases.
Not only did we launch a brand new testing tool, we also found time to update the Forgot Password and Reset Password pages. These look a lot better, are completely mobile responsive and align with the same overall styling as the Login page, updated in v1.8.7.
A small update to the Test Sessions feature, which is still an internal feature whilst we continue to work on it. Test Sessions has now been added to the admin navbar for desktop and mobile.
The next version will be smaller, the last 2 or 3 releases have taken some effort and so we're taking a bit of a breather.
There will be some improvements to Sites Beta, the accessibility results are getting some improved styling and it will be possible to open full page screenshots.
In a few releases, we're thinking about being able to add bugs directly from Sites, which could then feed straight into any connected tools. For our customers that have ongoing testing with WebDepend, adding a bug from sites would automatically pick up the associated accessibility error details and then sync that bug to the connected Asana, Teamwork, Linear, ClickUp, Trello or Jira integration.
