Application Development: Website Testing Application

=================================== Website Testing Application Brief A simple program to perform Automated batch testing of websites. --------------------- Description A batch program to perform a series of tests on a list of website addresses. The program needs to be able to perform a series of tests on a list of website URLs and then provide the results for each test as an output – either pass or fail or some other score. ------------------------------------------ Basic Functionality – perform three tests on a list of URLs At the very least the program needs to perform three automated tests equivalent to: 1. HTML Validity [login to view URL] 2. CSS Validity [login to view URL] 3. Links Check [login to view URL] ------------------------------------------ Optional Additional Functionality In addition to the three basic tests, it would be very useful and valued to run other tests on the same list of URLs to provide extra information to judges about each website such as: - Popularity (usage stats: Who, how many, how often from where, how long) - Relevance and engagement (citations and linkages) - Publishing (volume of pages) - Performance (responsiveness and availability) - Cross platform compatibility (Cross browser compatibility, Mobile OK) - Others suggestions welcome Any additional test results included or proposed would be most valued and appreciated and will be considered in selecting the successful bidder. It is envisaged this may include things like backlink counts from Google, Google ranking information, traffic information from Alexa, total pages in the web domain from a recursive spider crawl, result of a spell check or others you can easily include and may want to suggest. --------------------- Resources There are programs to run the three basic tests already available and the open source code and executable are available from W3C: 1) W3C Markup Validator [login to view URL] A CGI script called "check" that does pretty much everything, and possibly also the [login to view URL] configuration file snippet for Apache. Select the topmost revision numbers on these pages to see the most recent revision of each file. 2) CSS Validator Download and Install the CSS Validator [login to view URL] The CSS Validation service is based on a servlet written in the cross-platform Java language, and can be installed on any servlet platform. While the official service from W3C runs under the Jigsaw server (which is the recommended setup), we will for the sake of convenience describe in this guide the setup under Apache's servlet engine, Tomcat, as well as some quick instructions for Jigsaw and command line usage. 3) Link Checker [login to view URL] The link checker is written in Perl. It is packaged as a standard CPAN distribution, and depends on a few other modules which are also available from CPAN. Additionally, W3C offers a Mobile Friendly checker [login to view URL] ------------------------------------------ Development Platform The program can be written using any language or development environment but an open source approach is preferred. We’d like to build on the initial work so extensibility is valued. --------------------- Deliverables A fully working bug-free executable program that runs on Windows, or another platform by negotiation. The source code for this program and some brief documentation describing how it works. The input is a text file of website addresses (URLs) and the output is a corresponding list of test results for each of these URLS. ------------------------------------------ Testing One at a time URL testing can be done online using W3C online tools: [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] ------------------------------------------ Follow-on work There is an opportunity for further work.