The latest and greatest features of a software release are worthless if they break the features of the previous versions. Regression testing is an essential part of the release process that lets you know if this going to happen. Because this means that you’ll be testing the same things over and over, automated testing will make this task much easier. This is where ObservePoint comes in.
If you work in an organization where you don’t find out about a release until it breaks the analytics tagging, scheduling weekly audits and web journeys will help you stay on top of these issues. If your releases are typically scheduled on the same day of the week, schedule them to run the morning after.
When you discover an issue, fix it if you can (usually in your tag manager) or alert the necessary people to fix it. Larger issues may need to be escalated to the development lead. If it will take more than twenty-four hours to fix:
- Send a brief note to your analysts describing the missing data and when you expect it to be available again.
- Work on the fix, bringing in development resources if necessary.
- Follow up with the analysts when the data is available again.
If you can fix it the same day:
- Fix it!
- Let the development team know what caused the issue and that it is fixed.
- Send a brief note to the analysts detailing what data was missing and for how long and letting them know that the issue is fixed.
At the end of the day, your being proactive will bring visibility to analytics and show the organization that you care and take responsibility. After doing this a few times, don’t be surprised if your development lead starts including you in the release cycle.
Pre-Release Testing
If you can access your staging environment publicly with or without a login, you can setup web journeys with ObservePoint.
Audits
An audit will crawl your site and look for predefined tags. If at least one tag for a vendor exists, it will tell you if any pages are missing that tag.
Web Journeys
A journey allows you to track interactions with a process and check various tag elements at any step of the flow.
Using CSS Element IDs Only?
ObservePoint’s interface only makes it easy to execute button clicks or populate fields using the element ID. In our experience, these IDs are not added to elements that often. While it is recommended that these IDs be unique, this is not enforced by browsers. For the best results, you will need to know how to execute clicks or fill in fields using Javascript based on other CSS element attributes such as class, and we will guide you through this process.