Leaving your job and training your replacement? There are four simple rules to effective knowledge transfer: create independence, work together, plan and give yourself the time to do these things. First and foremost: assume that you will not be available to answer any more questions after you leave. Even if you're staying in the same …
Continue reading "The Doomed Knowledge Transfer: Last Minute, Improvised Show and Tell"
In a lot of offices, if you're not typing or clicking - you're not working. It's an odd view for any member of an industry that prides itself on thought and creativity. To analyse a problem, understand it and come up with a creative solution to it, you need to think about it. Thinking, for …
Continue reading "Lessons I Learned as a Tester, 7: Stop. Think."
If you're working on a product and have no particular understanding of UX, you can still do a basic UX review to stop the most obvious disasters. This will not be as good as getting a UX expert or experienced UX-QA to review the product, but it will be much better than nothing. First, describe …
We've all worked with testers who were bad at their job; it was frustrating and felt like a giant waste of time and effort. But hold on to those bad testers: they're more useful than you think. In my experience, bad testers have several common traits: they're fairly illogical, disorganized, forgetful (and never write things …
Continue reading "Lessons I Learned as a Tester, 6: The Secret Usefulness of Bad QAs"
Programming: we didn't start out crazy, we're being driven crazy.
Some bugs, even quite severe ones, can seem to your users like very nice features. Bugs that are likely to reach this status are those that make work smoother at the expense of security (for example, not enforcing part of the permissions mechanism), faster by letting users skip steps that should be mandatory (for example, …
Designing something? "Simplicity doesn’t happen accidentally. It needs to be actively cultivated. Complexity is what happens when you aren’t paying attention".
Technical writers have a very clear goal: explain the interface. That means they notice, instantly, when it's inexplicable. If your interface is a confusing mess with overly-complicated procedures, buttons that make no sense, important options hidden in sub-menus and related options kept a mile apart, it's not only hard to use - it's hard to …
Continue reading "QA: Need Help Finding UX Faults? Ask the Technical Writers"
The only way to improve, the internet keeps telling us, is to push yourself past your comfort zone so that you're always learning new things. Writing day in and day out, however, can mean you start to churn out documents on semi-automatic, settling for your current skill level and never improving. In fact, some of your skills, …
Continue reading "Make Yourself a Better Writer: Treat Every Document Like a Writing Sample"
Here's a quick writing tip for user manuals: don't add your images to the manual until you're done writing your text. This has two advantages. The first is that when you add images one at a time over the long course of writing a manual, it's easy to overdo it. When you add them all …
Continue reading "Quick Writing Tip: Don’t Add Images Until the Text is Done"
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