BANGALORE, INDIA: One definition of documentation is 'Any written or pictorial information describing, defining, specifying, reporting, or certifying activities, requirements, procedures, or results.'. Documentation is as important to a product's success as the product itself.

Documentation testing is nothing but testing concerned with the accuracy of documentation. Documentation meets its goal when it provides enough and necessary information to end users or customers.

A well-established method of documentation testing provides several benefits to an organization. These include customer satisfaction, reduced costs, improved overall product quality, and improved document draft correction.It would fall under the key practice of quality assurance activities.  Bad documentation, has a ripple effect on the number of users it impacts such as Product Development, Training, and Customer Support.

How to get job in Software Testing?

Generally, Technical Writers work to tight schedules, which often does not include documentation testing because there is no time. Besides, who wants to take the risk of causing a rewrite or correcting product design and not shipping on schedule? Every Technical Writer has experienced resistance to doing what is necessary to thoroughly test manuals.

Hence to increase the flexibility of time and resources, the manual process of testing the product documentation can be Automated. Automation involves automating a manual process already in place using a formalized testing process. A test automation tool is used to verify the various functional points involved in document testing.

Let us note here that the automation process does not include verification of the technical content of the document, however it covers the major verification points like validating the Bookmarks with the corresponding pages within the document, the Table of Contents with the respective pages with the content heading and the various links within the document opens the right window or URL  referred in the link.

Automating this entire process avoids redundancy on test execution, increases test coverage, thus increasing the quality and reliability of the software and most importantly avoids the hectic manual involvement in doing the same which in turn leads to partial and inaccurate testing.

Now, none of the Automation Tools can completely recognize objects uniquely within the PDF document due to which it causes certain restrictions to efficiently automate the documentation testing process.

We at Qualitree Solutions have come up with a solution to resolve the same. We make use of  the Acrobat Application Programming Interface(APIs) to overcome the loophole. This increases the stability of test automation scripts since the API offers an established means of communicating with Acrobat Reader.

To summarize, documentation testing automation ensures  successful completion of the product life cycle.

(The author is general manager for technology, Qualitree)