Hey folks. My name is Kevin Feige and I'm the Test Lead for Guided Help. Our team tests all aspects of Guided Help to make sure everything works as expected under all sorts of conditions.

 

One question that will come up as our customers author their own topics is, "How can topics be tested to ensure they work?" To start things off here are some general things to think about when testing your content with Guided Help:

 

                                 i.            Consider the "state" of the machine. For example, is the Start menu in Vista mode or classic mode? What about the Control Panel? What happens if the user changes these settings? What if UI is only available when a specific piece of hardware or software is installed? Rather than having Guided Help stop because it can't find a UI element, have error checking built into the script so that the user receives better feedback.

                               ii.            What failures could occur along the way that would prevent the topic from completing? Could your application's UI be modified by the user that causes the UI to appear differently than your Guided Help topic expects?

                              iii.            What if the UI is slow to appear or if other things are happening on the machine that slow things down? Should the timeout of a specific step in your script be increased to compensate for this? And this also goes for the target hardware your application will be deployed to. What if the machine is just inherently slow?

                             iv.            Then there is localization. Are you deploying only in one specific language or are you planning on multiple languages? The Guided Help Authoring tool that comes with the Vista OPK can only handle authoring for one language at a time, so if you're using it, you'll want to re-record each script for each taget language.  The Guided Help team is hoping to make a tool available that we use internally, that lets you record scripts as 'language neutral', meaning they can be recorded once and played back on any language.  That's how the scripts that ship with Vista are recorded. 

 

There are many more topics and details with regards to testing Guided Help topics. I'm just barely scratching the surface with the ideas above, but it's a good place to start as you plan on writing your own topics.

 

My team and I will be contributing more to this blog in the future so stay tuned for more ideas about testing Guided Help.

 

Thanks,

Kevin