The Software Testing community has been talking about the importance of product documentation of late. As they say, the devil, is in the details. There are two places that I think that the devil will manifest itself, and those two places are the configuration files of the product and the dependencies, and the product documentation. I cannot stress enough the importance of getting these two things right for a pleasant user experience and great Software Quality. Let’s talk about product documentation in this article.
I have been working on a project that involves using a supporting product that I’m new to. The good-natured that I am, I assumed that the product documentation is going to be a straight-forward, bullet by bullet list of steps, if executed sincerely, will get the supporting product up and running, so that I can work on testing the product that I am involved with, and my assumption was so incorrect!
The supporting product’s documentation had several issues and many assumptions. At the end of reading it, I was more confused that I was before I started. Some of the issues that I saw were:
- Keywords used without proper context and introduction, so a new person looking at the product do not understand the product’s architecture or buzzwords
- Examples of product usage being vague and not very specific to the point and to the scenario of the use case
- Product having multiple versions (e.g. 1.0, 2.0), and a Google search shows a clutter of links where sometimes the link does not say if the commands correspond to v1.0 or v2.0, and v1.0 and v2.0 commands are mostly different!
- Documentation covering the topics just for coverage sake and not taking into consideration the user who is going to read it and apply it .
As a Software Tester, you can play a role in resolving these kind of challenges. To look and see the product from a fresh user perspective, and figure out how the product documentation needs to be, and suggesting that to the product team is one of the major responsibilities of the software tester. And on the same note, I hope you would agree that minimal documentation for the sake of actual development should not hinder the team from producing a crisp and precise documentation that’s valuable for the user. With Markup facility, we have all the tools in hand to have a great documentation, while developing the product!
Hope that gives you a sense of why product documentation is important and how to go about it.
Feel free to chat with me if your organisation’s testers can contribute to a great user experience (including product documentation).