QA Focus in-house QA: Policy on Usage Statistics

Area:

Usage Statistics For the QA Focus Web Site

Policy:

QA Focus will collect and analyse usage statistics for the QA Focus Web site.

Summary of the Data Collected:

QA Focus will be collecting standard information available from the Web server log File including IP address, user agent referer field, etc. The IP address is collected, but not the domain name, as resolving this causes performance problems.

The Sitemeter third party tool is also used to collect data. Further information on Sitemeter is available at http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/statistics/.

Analysis Of The Data:

WebTrends is used to produce reports for use by the QA Focus team and, if necessary for our funders.

Justification:

Web statistics provide a useful indicator of the performance of the Web site. However Web usage statistics can be misleading and to fully understand their meaning it may be necessary to carry out data mining, in order to detect patterns which may be hidden from simple analyses.

Further information is available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/help/papers/performance/.

Responsibilities:

The QA Focus project manager is responsible for this policy. The QA Focus Web editor is responsible for ensuring that appropriate procedures are deployed.

Exceptions:

Not all the Web server log files will be used.

Procedures For Ensuring Compliance

We will implement the following procedures on usage statistics to ensure that the policies are implemented.