Developer Tools in QA: Novice's Toolkit
Description[edit]
A beginner's guide to using built-in browser developer tools to explore Quality Assurance (QA) issues in web archive captures. This toolkit is focused primarily on archivists who have Archive-It subscriptions and use Heritrix, Brozzler and Webrecorder/Conifer. The toolkit has been used primarily with Google Chrome and Firefox browsers, although the same type of analysis could be applied to other browsers.
It is a "living document", intended to be shared and updated collaboratively. It is aimed at new web archivists, and web archivists who are new to using web developer tools for QA. Web developer tools can be quickly accessed in Firefox by pressing Crtl+Shift+E, Crtl+Shift+I in Chrome.
The toolkit includes diagnostic use cases for the "elements", "console" and "network" sections of browser development tools. These can help the archivist spot locations of missing CSS elements, javascript issues which might affect replay, and errors occurring in network requests, which can help identify resources missing in a copy.