Efficient way of figuring out whether web apps are forward compatible with a new browser?

Question

So my company has web applications created in .NET/ASP.NET which are fully supported in IE 8 (current company standard). We want to move our company standard browser to IE 10 or 11.

Also, we have external employees/clients who may use other browsers (FF, Chrome, Safari, etc).

We would like some efficient way of assessing our applications (over 200) to see how ready they are to be used in a more modern browser and to help us figure out what type of changes need to be done in order to make it compatible.

Is there any tool/technique for the job. It doesn't have to be fully automated. We can do some manual checking as well. But it should be as efficient as possible.

I also know many other organizations have gone through this process of upgrading their legacy applications. What successful approaches are there for this task?

Answer 1

1. Ask the employees who use other browsers about known issues on non-IE8 browsers, assuming you don't track those issues yet.
2. Have an experienced developer do a cursory check of the code to spot known incompatibilities.
3. Run the existing automated tests with the new standard browser instead of the old one.
4. Define high priority applications, where failure is very visible and/or very expensive, and run exploratory testing.
5. Perform a "beta" with a limited set of users where acceptance of errors is high and a fallback is available.

Since you are already using some other browsers and these might work, it's possible that the development standards were high enough that most of the applications just work. It's also possible that everything falls apart, that's what makes accurate estimation very tricky. Since it's pretty obvious that you will have to move away from IE8 very soon due to end of life, I recommend just doing the migration with the steps listed above and adjust the estimate based on what you find as you progress. Steps 1-3 are cheap and allow for a decent initial estimation of work.

Answer 2

The Internet Explorer Dev Team provide a compatibility scanner that should help flag up incompatibilities with modern versions of Internet Explorer: https://www.modern.ie/en-gb/compat-scan

If you need to run the tool from an intranet, here's the open source version: https://github.com/InternetExplorer/modern.IE-static-code-scan

There's plenty more info and tools available on the Modern.IE website, including VMs for all possible combinations of IE versions (6+) and Windows versions (XP+).

In terms of testing approach, I concur with Peter's response to this question.