Testing costs Re: accessible banking:

I think that the cost of testing here is overestimated - without going  
into specifics (which can obviously vary by orders of magnitude) I would  
suggest that with reasonable expertise tens of hours would be mor like it.  
(Note that developing expertise takes time and money, too).

An important point that Kurt hasn't noted explicitly is that what is  
important is to examine how sites are actually created in practice,  
looking for ways that errors may creep in unnoticed, or may be picked up  
by the "background QA" that everyone in an organisation does as they  
work...

Testing is difficult. But expertise allows testers to do it relatively  
rapidly, and effectively, where people who have just started learning to  
do it will be slower and pick up less - although this is a gross  
generalisation. *Good* testing tools can also help substantially, although  
they cannot yet (in my opinion) allow a total novice to do the job of an  
expert. They can also be very valuable in turning a novice into an expert  
as fast and cheaply as possible.

Cheers

Chaals

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 11:47:45 -0500, <Kurt_Mattes@bankone.com> wrote:

>
> Perhaps there is a lack of large site experience on this list.
> Testing a 'template based' bank site on two platforms with two
> browsers for each platform requires thousands of QA hours.
> Each additional browser/platform combination adds hundreds of
> additional testing hours.  It is nice to think the cost of
> accessibility is low, unfortunately reality proves that for large
> dynamic sites it is considerable.  Without testing, how do I
> know it degrades gracefully?  When it can be said that a site is
> accessible after successfully testing one or only a few pages built
> with each template in the sites design, it can be said that testing
> isn't that difficult.

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile - Vice Presidente - Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org                      http://www.sidar.org
     (chaals is available for consulting at the moment)

Received on Tuesday, 8 February 2005 00:51:11 UTC