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A set of guidelines and best practices for an awesome software engineering team
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Cross-browser testing write-up #169

Closed ryanhofdotgov closed 4 years ago

ryanhofdotgov commented 4 years ago

Addresses #92

adborden commented 4 years ago

At one point BrowserStack was an option, is that no longer the case?

ryanhofdotgov commented 4 years ago

I think the current state of affairs is that BrowserStack is not an approved solution at GSA and the TTS Tech Portfolio has been working diligently to make sure all SaaS we use has the proper authorizations:

The last tech portfolio discussion I see on BrowserStack was back in September 2019 – recommendation was that a TTS dev submit it (and presumably champion it through) the IT Standards process.

ryanhofdotgov commented 4 years ago

As someone new to the organization, I haven't come across specific guidelines for browser support generally. Is there a resource? If so, should it be referenced here? If not, is there a small note of general advice that could be included?

The initial goal with this doc was to publish instructions on how to test with Internet Explorer 11, but then it sort of ballooned as I started thinking of other devices/browsers I've manually checked against at TTS over the past year 😅

I'll start a conversation in #dev and see if we have some general consensus on what browsers we should be supporting – we ran out of time during today's guild meeting. I think we could add that guidance in a 2nd pass to this page.

My two cents: Products should plan to support "recent" versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari and IE11. In the absence of access to something like Sauce Labs or BrowserStack, start off with just Chrome-based headless automated testing you can run in CI. Add in regular, manual checks under IE11 and manual checks on different device sizes using the Chrome device toolbar. Do more involved things as your product matures, user base grows.

Also, if you haven't seen it yet, https://analytics.usa.gov/ gives a nice picture of the browser usage on a portion of the public-facing federal websites. I am assuming that usage for Internet Explorer 11 jumps up quite a bit for internal government web applications/sites. And at different agencies too – DoD public-facing sites show 20% IE use.

ryanhofdotgov commented 4 years ago

@afeld Sounds good – thanks!