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Component Development Guide > Certification

Component Testing

The main item we need to get your component certified is, of course, the component itself. Before submitting your component for certification, please make sure that it follows the design principles we have outlined, and has been thoroughly tested!

For component design, please read the Guidelines & Best Practices section to make sure you understand and follow Flite's design principles.

For component testing, please read this article for some advice on how to test your component before submitting it to Flite for certification. Our Quality Assurance team follows these same practices during the QA Review portion of the Certification Process -- so if you do this while testing, your component should pass with flying colors.

General testing guidelines 

  • Test from both the customer's and the user's perspective: It is important to remember that your component has two very different audiences. The first is the advertisers, who will be integrating your component into their ads; they will want a component that is straightforward and easy to configure, and will be dealing primarily with the component's configuration settings. The second is the end users, who will see your component within an ad running on a publisher web page; they will value a component that is easy to use, error-free, and well-designed. You must think of both audiences when testing your component.
  • Test on multiple browsers: Flite ads should run correctly on the latest version of all major browsers, so your component must work properly all of these browsers as well. This includes the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, as well as some older versions of these browsers. Be sure to test your component on all of these to make sure that it works as expected, and that its functionality is consistent across browsers.
  • Be thorough: Make sure to test all corner cases, all possible component workflows, all error conditions, and so on. This goes both for testing the parameters, and testing the functionality of the component itself. What happens if you specify -1 as the value of a parameter that expects positive integers? What happens if an end user types in gibberish in one of your component's form fields? Your component should handle all of these situations correctly.

What to test and how to test it

There are three key pieces that you need to test: the parameters, the component itself, and the metrics.

Parameters: Add your component to an ad like an ad designer would, and test all the parameters. See the Component Integration article for details on how to add your component to an ad. Pay special attention to the following:

  • Usability: Is it easy to understand what each parameter does? Is there help text where there should be help text?
  • Appearance: Are the parameters grouped appropriately? Are they laid out well? Do they look good in the Inspector Panel?
  • Regular use: Try a few different values for each parameter to make sure it behaves as intended.
  • Corner cases: Try some more unusual parameter values to make sure the component behaves appropriately when they are entered.

Component: Interact with your component like an end user would to make sure it behaves appropriately. This means placing your component inside the ad, and perhaps even placing the ad on a test page in order to simulate the user experience more closely. Pay special attention to the following:

  • Functionality: Make sure the component does what it is supposed to do.
  • Usability: Is it easy for a user to understand how to interact with the component? Do component interactions yield expected results?
  • Appearance: Is the component laid out nicely? Does it look good?
  • Regular use: Interact with the component as a reasonable end user might, and make sure it behaves as intended.
  • Error conditions: Test behaviors that you know lead to various error conditions, and make sure the errors are handled gracefully, and error messages are displayed when necessary.
  • Try to break it: Interact with the component as a not-so-reasonable end user might – type gibberish into text fields, etc. Make sure your component is robust enough to stand up to abuse.

Metrics: Make sure that the component is tracking events as you intended it to track them. You can do this with the Metrics Debugger, found in Ad Studio’s Flight Module. This handy tool allows you to see the events that are tracked as you interact with an ad in real-time.