Though it might not be immediately obvious to those involved in developing documentation, poor quality documentation costs both users and developers a lot of time and money. When documentation is published and it contains errors or is inadequate for the job for which it was designed, companies pay for it. Companies often end up spending additional time and money providing increased after-sales support, in writing, editing, published and distributing documentation revisions, and in some cases, in defending lawsuits brought on as the result of documentation errors.

Winning publications are carefully planned, well written, precisely edited, gloriously illustrated, beautifully composed, painstaking tested, and printed with the most tender of care.

Purpose of documentation testing:

Gathering information:

• How easy the product and documentation are to use
• Areas of document where factual information is incorrect and must be changed
• Improvements that should be made to the product or the documentation to make it easier to use or improve its value, but which might have to be done at a later date.
• Product features that might prove to be troublesome for the users
• Documentation text that can be eliminated, thus reducing production, printing and distribution costs
• Elements of the documentation that might function more effectively if they are presented electronically instead of in printed documentation or vice versa
• Information that is relevant, important, and missing from the documentation

Location and correcting document errors:

Types: Errors, omissions and discrepancies.

Importance of Quality:

2 ways to define quality

• product’s return on investment (ROI)
• usefulness to an individual

Factors that affect an individuals determination of a product’s quality are personal or political, there are at least three guidelines that can be commonly applied when assessing a product’s quality:

• Meets or exceeds user expectations and needs
• Limits product defects
• Improves the product’s performance

What the user wants to do with a particular product what the user needs to be able to do with particular product might not be the same. To help ensure the quality of product, you should measure not only how well it meets your user’s needs, but also how well it meets their wants.

In ‘creating value for customers’ William A. Band States:

The idea of creating value may, indeed, be reduced to a concept as simple as striving to become ever more 'useful’ to customers. But, of course, good intentions must be transformed into practical reality. The businesses that will succeed in the decades ahead are not those with advantages defined in terms of internal functions, but those that can become truly market-focused – that is, able to profitably deliver sustainable superior value to their customers. This means being able to do the following:

• Choose the target customer and the combination of benefits and price that to the customer would constitute superior value.
• Manage all functions to rigorously reflect his choice of benefits and prices so that the business actually provides and communicates this chosen value and does so at a cost allowing adequate returns.

Quality is affected by two factors:

• Timeliness of the return on investment
• Continued usability of th product

Why Quality is important:

Why should we even concern ourselves with the quality of our product? If the market needs or wants the product we sell, will they not still buy the product regardless of its quality? Well that might be true in a socialistic society or in times of scarce supply, but not in a free market society or in times of sufficient supply.

PONC – Price of nonconformance

POC – price of conformance

Philiip Crosby:

Prices of nonconformance are all the expenses involved in doing things wrong. This includes the efforts to correct sales persons’ order when they come in, to correct the procedures that are drawn up to implement orders and to correct the product or the service as it goes along, to do work over, and to pay for warranty and other nonconformance claims. When you add all those together it is an enormous amount of money, representing 20 percent or more of sales in manufacturing companies and 35 percent of operating costs in service companies.

Price of conformance is what it is necessary to spend to make things come out right. This includes most of the professional quality functions, all prevention efforts, and quality education. It also covers such areas as procedural or product qualification. It usually represents about 3 to 4 percent of sales in a well-run company.

Quality is the ability to consistently get what people need. That means producing what people will value and not producing what people won’t value.

Profit is not the only reason to be concerned about quality, however, even though many companies must make it their first concern or risk going out of business. Two other reasons for quality are also important – contributing to society and fulfilling a need.

Contributing to society – is an important consideration even if a company is not concerned about the profit they make. For companies that are not profit oriented, their contribution to society is often a very important reason for them to be concerned about quality.

Making a profit, contributing to society and fulfilling needs do not come free.

Cost of quality: obvious costs, hidden costs

Obvious costs: product design, development, payroll, raw materials and general business operating expenses. Less obvious costs include advertising, promotion and other contract services. When a company increases any of these costs in the name of improving product quality, the increases become tagged as increases in product quality costs. You can find other costs that are associated: e.g. special training.

Hidden costs: difficult to identify and quantify.

One of the most important of the hidden costs is associated with resistance that exists to improving product quality, because it generally means change.

By nature, people resist change. They prefer to be comfortable in their environment, tending to choose patterns and habits with which they are familiar over learning and developing new skills and habits. Improving product quality often requires change. Change often causes stress. Stress often causes resistance. Resistance often increases the cost of improving product quality. Therefore before you can implement change to improve product quality, you first have to overcome resistance to change. This is a cost that is not easy to identify, and can, therefore be a hidden cost of improving product quality.

Whether obvious or hidden, conforming or nonconforming, monetary or social, the quality of a product affects the profits of its manufacturer, and of all people and companies associated with it. To ignore quality is to ignore profit – a dangerous gamble in a profit-driven market economy.

Improve your odds by improving quality in your company, its documentation, and its products by implementing documentation testing.

Benefits and drawbacks of documentation testing:

Long-term benefits

• Better document quality
• Better product quality
• More usable products
• Fewer product releases
• Fewer document rewrites and errata

Short-term benefits

• reduced documentation page count
• improved product design
• reduced after sale service costs
• reduced training costs

Draw backs

• Potential increase in development costs
• Team interdependence
• Resistance to change

Types of documents:

• Conceptual
• Procedural
• Quick reference

Conceptual documents provide the reader with information about various aspects of the product that might not be included in other types of documents.

Procedure documents give instructions for the completion of a particular task or set of tasks

Quick reference: brevity is the key to a quick reference document. They are usually written and designed for individuals who are very familiar with the product, but who might need occasional help with one aspect of it or another.

Successful personality traits:

• Group participation skills
• Communication skills
• Product aptitude
• Ability to handle stress
• Ability to adapt to change
• Organizational skills

Group Participation Skills

• being a good listener
• always being prepared
• having a sense of humor
• being empathetic
• being outgoing

Organizational skills

• meet deadlines
• be a self-starter
• enjoy learning
• enjoy problem solving

Starting:

Tasks to accomplish to overcome problems

• Get approval of the idea
• Overcome objectives to the idea
• Show the cost of not implementing the idea

Follow company procedure’s for submitting ideas, or

Present idea directly to your manager

Conduct additional research to help provide the idea

• Meet resistance to change
• Consider the cost of not implementing the idea
• Deal with writers who oppose the idea
• Deal with uncooperative engineers or developers
• Record, review and analyze relevant information
• Track and record additional relevant information
• Get permission to conduct more detailed research
• Document the results
• Management Proposal:
• Overview
• Benefits
• Drawbacks
• Mission
• Development process
• Costs
• Quality improvements

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possess the only strength which can overcome adversity.

Proposal:

• The proposal must be clear and without errors
• The proposal must be rigidly structured to make it easy for the audience to see how one point flows to another
• The proposal must contain a limited number of the most important points
• Each point covered in the proposal must be clearly identified and separate from each other point
• The arrangement of presenting each point must be logical and orderly
• Transitions from one point to the next should be logical and smooth
• The proposal should contain a beginning, middle and an end.
• The proposal should be presented as effectively as possible.