What’s a quality assurance (QA) check?
Organizations need to review their published content regularly to prevent basic quality issues. Monthly quality assurance (QA) checks help you decrease the risk associated with undermanaged content. Unmanaged content often includes broken links, older versions of policies or applications, and services you no longer offer. It leads to things like incomplete applications submissions and constituents following guidance you no longer recommend. It also increases constituent frustration and decreases their trust in your organization.
We recommend checking for the following once a month:
- Broken links
- Accessibility issues
- Content that’s now redundant or obsolete
- Performance issues that require further investigation
If you’re doing them regularly, QA checks should only take a couple of hours per month.
Conducting these checks will be much easier if you’ve previously completed an audit for redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) content. In fact, a consistent QA check process may prevent you from needing an expensive ROT audit.
This guide is about performing a QA check on your Mass.gov content. The same principles apply to other sites, but you'll need to find replacements for the specific tools and reports we recommend.
Find and fix broken links
The Mass.gov CMS includes a content performance report with metrics that will help you find several QA issues. You can filter this report for your content and export it. You’ll need to make sure all the content you’re managing shares the same Organization or label. If it doesn’t, you won’t be able to filter for the pages you manage.
Fix any broken links the report shows. The Mass.gov Knowledge Base provides instructions for fixing broken links with Siteimprove.
Find and fix accessibility issues
The Mass.gov CMS also includes Editoria11y, which helps you find accessibility issues. The Editoria11y accessibility report lists published pages with flagged accessibility issues. You’ll need to visit each page to view the specific issues and address them. If no pages are listed in the report, there are no flagged issues to address.
Additional resources for learning about accessibility
Check for content that’s now outdated or redundant
This step is important for organizations with lots of different authors, or without a centralized team that manages their content.
Review content that has been published since your last QA check. To do this, you can export a list of your content from the CMS and check its publication date. Look to see if this content:
- Covers the same or some of the same material as another published page
- Contradicts or revises something published elsewhere
If it does, address the issue by combining or removing content. You might also ask the person or team that published the new content to do this.
Some teams prefer to include this step in the process of publishing something new. For example, before adding a new webpage, they list how other related content will need to change. This can drastically reduce the amount of redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) content you have published.
Create a backlog for issues you notice during QA checks
While running a QA check, you may notice other issues. For example, you may find a page that is a long or hard-to-navigate list of links. You’re fairly sure nobody can easily navigate this page. However, fixing it would take a while.
We recommend creating a content backlog to keep track of these issues. You can use a spreadsheet for your backlog or some other work tracking software. The backlog should include the following information:
- Task: What needs to be done
- Details: An extended description of the task, including any details you might need later when you set out to do it, such as URL(s).
- Priority: How important is it (e.g. “low,” “medium,” “high”)
- Level of effort: How easy will it be to do?
- Who added it: Teams of more than 1 person should keep track of who added what. This helps you know whom to ask for more information when you return to address a task later.
The backlog helps keep work manageable. Adding something to a backlog sets an intention to address it. It also keeps the QA check moving, since you don’t pause every time you need to address an issue. Teams that don’t use backlogs can easily get distracted trying to fix every issue they encounter.
Maturing your process: Performance checks
If you want to take your QA check process further, you can review your content’s performance.For example, the Mass.gov CMS provides basic analytics and feedback for every page.
Start with the content performance report—the same one you used to find broken links. It also includes “Nos per K” and “eject rate” metrics.
- Nos per thousand (“k”) indicates a high ratio of feedback to traffic. (This is more meaningful when pageviews are higher, less when views are lower.)
- A high eject rate means lots of people are leaving without finding what they’re looking for (searches, following a header/footer link, etc.)
If these are high, it may be an indicator that something is wrong. You don’t need to solve the problem now, though. Add a note in your backlog to dig into the page later.
Using QA checks this way can help you continuously improve content, not just manage it.