Relevant tp EVERY THING I Do at Work

While this article is focused on testing products that people use in a variety of environments (link below), there is plenty of relevancy to the work I do on a daily basis when it comes to my disaster recovery documentation that I generate through RoboHelp for consumption by my co-workers. When people - my co-workers - use my documentation, it is because they have to use it.

As I've wrote before, the premise is that there's been a disaster and 16 critical systems are down and need to be restored. My documentation explains how to bring those systems back online. It has been identified that, in such a situation, there will be three different ways to obtain my documentation. The first is through browser so, one of the outputs I generate is called WebHelp. The second is by using a laptop that does not have Internet access. So for that scenario, I generate old-school HTML-Help output with a .CHM file extension. The third is through a printed version of the documentation in a PDF. This is the version I like the least and have devoted a small percentage of my time towards developing and making it look nice. The reason for this is that a lot of the content I include in the documentation are links to the following file types:

1. BAK
2. CSV
3. JPG
4. PDF
5. PNG
6. PPT
7. TXT
8. XLS
9. ZIP

It's pretty much impossible to transform the content in those files to a single PDF that looks good. Thus, I've been focusing much more of my time into developing a way to access the content in those file types through the browser-based output.

From my perspective, as a technical writer, there is a sincere advantage for using a tool like RoboHelp for my work. Essentially, it's this: my old-school HAT (Help Authoring Tool) is awesome when it comes down to generating an output in different formats. I can tag content to be distributed in a PDF and have it excluded in the browser-based output and the old-school HTML-Help output with a .CHM file extension. Even back before I was hired, I was thinking about what to use for my work. After I was hired and during the early days of when I actually began working here on a daily basis, I remember debating whether I should use a tool that was comfortable to me - leveraging my 12 years of using RoboHelp at QDS - or if I should use a tool that I had used the previous (nearly) 5 years at Pearson, which was a wiki called Confluence. Ultimately, I chose RoboHelp. I've been working with RoboHelp on a daily basis for the last 1 year, 5 months, 4 weeks, 1 day (547 days total) since starting here on Monday, March 28, 2016.

But what do the above paragraphs have to do with testing a product that is used in a variety of environments?

Honestly, I started this post with an idea to go east, but this post has gone so far northwest, I can't reign it back to my original idea. Thus, read the article below.

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Testing Products People Will Use in a Variety of Environments