2.25 Conduct Regular Audits, Regression, and Non-Regression Tests

Products and services at any stage of a project can suffer bugs or issues that need to be resolved. Fixing these regressions also generates additional development and environmental costs. By resolving such issues, you can reduce the chances of a visitor giving up on a session and thereby reduce the amount of wasted energy your website emits overall.

Criteria

Regular Issue Testing: The codebase has been checked for bugs, performance issues hav been identified, and accessibility or security problems have been accounted for at either monthly or quarterly timeframes (depending on your scheduling allowance).
Non-Regression Tests: Non-regression tests are implemented for all important functionality.
Regression Tests: Regression testing has been incorporated into each release cycle to ensure that new features don’t introduce bugs or otherwise conflict with existing software functionality.

Impact

Medium

Effort

Medium

Benefits

Environmental:
Regular service audits reduce technical debt, which improves performance and environmental sustainability. Regression analysis also supports continuous improvement and lowers resource use over time, which also reduces emissions.
Security:
Regular auditing of a product or service will not only identify potential sources of breaches, but it will also identify areas of improvement both in security and privacy.
Accessibility:
Maintaining inclusivity over time through regular audits and testing reduces outages, improves access to information, and creates a better experience for all users, not just those with accessibility needs.
Economic:
Ongoing regression testing improves security, which reduces risk and its associated costs.

GRI

materials: Medium
energy: Medium
water: Medium
emissions: Medium

Example

It is important to automate measurements of page speed, time-to-first-byte, and page score to verify recent changes didn’t increase these metrics. Automatic threshold alerts or anomalies on metrics help indicate regression. Identify target “page weight budgets” to help establish a baseline. Popular performance tools like Google Lighthouse can help too. Similarly, environmental metrics can be measured or assessed and evaluated against thresholds defined in a sustainability budget. Here is a checklist for auditing a web design.

Resources

View the Guideline