After we've written documentation for an application, it's important to test it. Documentation testing ensures that the documentation is accurate, up-to-date with the application, clear, and consistent.
- When to test documentation
- Check for new versions of tools
- Check when documentation was last updated
- How to test
- Keep track of your work
- What to test
- Test the features described in the documentation
Test the workflow described in the documentation
Test a components described in the documentation
Update the documentation
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At the beginning of each month, you should check to see if new versions of the applications in the Knowledge Base are available. If there are, then you should update our documentation to reflect the new versions.
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In addition to checking for new versions of applications, you should also check to see when our documentation was last updated.
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We want to keep documentation up-to-date, so if it's been 2-3 months since documentation for an application or some pages within it have been updated, then you should test it.
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After you've determined which documentation needs to be tested, you can start testing.
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Start from the first page of the documentation and end with the last page.
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It's important to keep track of your your progress as well as to note what needs to be updated or what updates you've made.
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Your comment will appear below the page. Note that anyone with access to the page can read it.
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Broadly speaking, you're testing everything in the documentation we've written for an application. What you're specifically testing is to see if our documentation gives incorrect instructions for the application's features, components, and overall workflow.
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If a feature we describe in our documentation is outdated, then we need to update our documentation so that it correctly explains how to use a feature.
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It used to be that you could simply upload an image and comment on it as a whole, but then NowComment made it so that you can comment on details of an image.
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If our documentation describes an outdated workflow for the tool, then we need to update our documentation with the new workflow.
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- Create a collection
- Add a text to a collection
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Look to see if buttons, search bars, labels, titles, etc. described in the documentation are now different in the application. If a component is different, update the documentation with the new components.
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- has the application's UI changed?
- has the "save" button changed to "save and continue"?
- is there now a "preview" button?
is the search function different from the way it used to be?
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As you test, update the documentation to match the application.
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See the "Look and Feel" section of the Step-by-step guide for information on the SBS theme.
Keep track of your work
It's important to keep track of your your progress as well as to note what needs to be updated or what updates you've made.
Go to Google Sheets to create a spreadsheet you can use to track your work.
Include 6 columns in the spreadsheet: Date | Name of Page or URL | Issue | No issue | Notes | Resolved? (Y/N)
Write the titles of each page within the documentation in the "Name of Page, Feature, or URL" column. This way you can keep track of which pages you have or have not tested.
Chris Jewell designed this spreadsheet for documentation/software testing. You don't need to worry about the JIRA column for documentation testing. That column is meant for software testing. See the Software Testing guide for more information on JIRA.
When you run into an issue, type X into the "Issue" column of the spreadsheet. Include a brief description of the issue in the "Notes" column, including the browser in which the issue occurred.
If a page doesn't need updates, type X into the the "No Issue" column.