automated web site QA tools

all i've heard so far is some IBM product called "watchfire"

We use the Mercury (now purchased by HP) tool suite, I think there's a LoadRunner and QuickTest Pro.

These product names make me want to punch myself in the nuts

what, because one sounds like they're being clever because it's like a video game title and the other one sounds like it's the name of $15 shareware from 1997?

yeajh i think a lot of these, including watchfire, are more for performance and load testing - i'm talking about something that will test against a bunch of possible coding faults, i.e. missing ALT attributes and META tags, color contrast, etc

Color contrast? No clue. Otherwise, just use the friggin w3c validator or one of the tools they link. I would bet some accessibility people have hacked up something for the contrast type stuff.

um w3c validator is a joke

kind of hoping for a suite of tools, with customer support

i've only used the mercury tools. quicktest pro is the tits for that sort of thing, but hella expensive

w3c validator is no joke. unless your code is completely fucked in which case trying to fix it using the validator can be a pain in the ass

optimizing meta tags is a fucking sham.

akm no i was too harsh there, it's good for spot-checks or whatever

OK this looks like exactly what i'm after:

http://www.powermapper.com/products/sortsite/

optimizing meta tags is a waste of time for search engines now, for the most part.

i'm not optimizing them, i just need to make sure they're consistent

meta tags are still relevant but only a part of the picture. ugh, the SEO guy we have makes us violent. they would prefer that our sites look like shit, but the SEO work. makes business sense, but it's a painful, painful crap lesson. designing for spiders instead of people. mr. googles is autistic.

mercury is a fave amongst our qa heavyweights.

for testing on the dev side, i have used selenium (more firefoxy)... and Watin (straight up msie).... both of these rule because they use element ids an other things to locate the button/image/href to click on. so if your page layout changes, but the names are the same (or there's a logical structure to the naming) you can use the same tests. some of the common tools in QA land are either vbscript backend that just POSTs or GETs and looks for some text in the resul... OR they are very position dependent. trouble here is that i have to pretty much write a little C# script by hand. (with Watin) if you're QA can't code, then you're hosed. great for automated unit tests tho.