Test plans for Help

[James_K__Patrick]

Morning all,

I'm starting down the road of writing a test plan for the Help system I've written. Hoping someone already has an outline that I can start from. Anyone?

My rough plan starting out is to test:

1. Workflow in RH before generation (TOC built, Index ready, spell check complete, topic properties updated, etc.)
2. Launch WebHelp locally and sanity check before sending to developers
3. Functional testing (i.e. does the help system even launch from the application?, does navigation work?)
4. Content testing (i.e. are all the topics there? are tasks correclty documented?)
5. Format testing (i.e. do multi-level list appear correctly in browser x, y and z?)

Does anyone test any other areas?  Just curious.

Patrick

[Guest]

if you use conditional build tags, wouldn't hurt to add a few spot checks to make sure that the build expression is actually excluding

what you want it to.

[James_K__Patrick]

Imarden,

Good point - I'm only using CBTs to exclude topics from output, so my testing is pretty easy. But for folks using CBTs to exclude text or do coditional text for different outputs, things could get messy.

I suppose one could incorporate the Build Tags report into the test plan.

Patrick

[disneeprincess]

Any concerns about print issues? Search/glossary/index issues?

[James_K__Patrick]

disneeprincess,

I don't have any print worries as I work for a web service company. Others might, and would need to have sections in their test plan for each type of SSL output.

Search and Index testing I'm working on, though I'm only spot checking of course. I've not yet implemented a Glossary as I haven't decided whether to use RH's built-in glossary functionality or simply create one topic with alphabetical links as described in other posts on this forum. Probably next version.

Patrick

[Guest]

this is a good topic - looking forward to hearing all input, as it's about time I insisted on our Help being treated with the

same process and consideration as the application.

[Nick27]

Things I routinely include in my testing, for web based help.

• Browser compaibitlity - IE ,6,7,8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera? This browser testing includes all of the following:

• For Safari, of course you should test on a Mac, in additiona I also test Firefox on the Mac, and now Chrome also.
• Test of any custom scripts, i.e Javascript Print button, Email feature, PDF displaying in  etc. Check the these fail nicely if the fail at all, custom user friendly error is displayed rather than a JS debug error.
  
• TOC Sync if using merged projects.
• Image sizing and viewability. Does the user need to scroll across to view an entire image.
• TOC horizontal scrolling, pet hate for me, so the TOC has a custom width to ensure the widest possible expansion is within the TOC pane.
• Viewing at various resolutions, our web app is designed with a minimum resolution catered for, so the help is tested against that - this will include scrolling, image width etc etc.
• Quick test of various topics that contains snippets to ensure they are correctly used and formatted.