Testing a Site Before Launch

aaron_karp

Hey All......

I'm about to launch my first site that actually sells something. In the past I've just built sites for fun, that maybe profitted a little from advertisements. This time, I've built a full-scale paypal-driven ecommerce-ish site that "sells" several online services. My question, is, how do I ever know when the site is ready for launch? I don't even know where to begin testing the site. Are there any programs out there that can test web applications and run through all possible sequences or something?

Think of my site like Ebay. It's a classified ad type of site, where people pay for the ads, but in a very niche market. How would one go about testing a site of similar theme, but obviously smaller scale, to Ebay? Has anyone ever come across a comprehensive list of things to test for before launch? For example, I recently discovered that since magic quotes were "Off" on my server, several of my Insert queries weren't working 100% of the time. That's fixed now, but I'm just nervous about launching a site that takes people's money. I want to make sure that everything works flawlessly.

Any suggestions? Thanks so much.

mystrymaster

There are scripts out there that can record your mouse movements and keystrokes and then repeat them for testing. I would simply ask some of your friends or co-workers to help you test and go about it that way.

werkkrew

turn your programming machine into a basic mirror of the actual webserver and launch the site on there

then beat the hell out of your scripts until you find problems, fix them and do it again, until there arent any problems...

then launch it for real

all youd need would be apache, mysql, and php which are all free

csousley

I have launched a few semi-big (over a million hits a month) sites. And no matter what you do, you will never find every bug before launch. Unless you have every flavor of unix, linux, mac, windows and so on, with every different browser and configuration you just won't find everything.

As suggested before, have everyone you know try and kill it. Work on a beta box and fix what you can find, launch, and fix whatever else shows up.

I wish I had a better answer for you, but that's what I have. If anyone knows of a program that does look at every possible situation, I would love to hear about it.

Good Luck

aaron_karp

How legit are the companies that offer to kill your site for you and test for bugs?

http://www.hardboiled.net
http://www.telsoft-inc.com

2 sites I came accross today...

And thanks for the advice.