Documentation

When I have had projects come in previously there is usually not much in the way of documentation, with minor updates or when I was dealing with a service provider on the web we had the occasional page update.  Occasionally we had a Release Note, or a help file, that was sent with the software or was linked in to a web page somewhere, but then the question would come up....how much do we test the documentation?

Granted, the Documentation Groups know how to spell and use grammar check in whatever software they use, sometimes using the software to check the steps out; that has to be the best group I ever worked with!  Still, when we get a package of code into QA we like to look at everything, and I always add a little time somewhere for documentation.  Even though there is someone reviewing the pages, I have encountered the odd missing comma, double period, mistyped word or homonym.  So I at least try to look over the page before it goes out, and my keen editorial third eye often finds something wrong on the page before I read a word.

This was something that I was reminded of recently when helping out a friend.  She is writing documentation in Chinese that needs to be translated to German.  To handle the intermediate step, though i have never seen Chinese to German translations I bet its interesting, they were going to do Chinese to English to German, but the English was awkward.  I was asked to review it, and sure enough there were some edits needed.  I made a few, tweaked a word or two, then sent it back to her; I have not heard back but I hope it made for a better document to be made into German.  Not that I will ever understand it.

In major projects I push to have an entry on the project schedule to get the docs in, and in with enough time for revision as there is usually something that may need a tweak or two.  Never a lot of time, but enough to make sure we cover it completely.  Its not really Testing the Documentation, more like a review, but in some ways it is important to make sure what the Customer has will also convey in a language they can understand what the software should do.  To me its an added dimension to Testing, more of a tangent, but still part of the whole.  As a generalist I find that QA is often more suited to this than say Developers, as we are technical enough to get down into the guts of the code and test appropriately, but can still stand back and as a Customer think and use it like they do.  This adds a good portion of completeness to me, and I think helps increase the Customer Experience a bit better while also making sure what they are delivered is good, understandable and won't make them think that something was rushed.