It simply, refers to the examination of all the documented objects of software artifacts that are involved prior and during the development of the software product. The testing technique is used to evaluate the documentation from all different perspectives; user or business-perspective.
Documentation testing may be seen as a non-functional testing technique, used to check out the documentation part of the development process. Besides documentation work pertaining to development phase, scope of documentation testing may be extended to testing phase also.
Why Documentation Testing is needed
Whether development or testing, both requires a proper documentation, which works as a resource, and guide or directs these process or their respective teams to efficiently and effectively carry out the process. Documentation work always acts as the base for any type of processes to execute. However, a fault or an error in the documentation may adversely affect or even leads to failure of the whole process.
Conducting Documentation Testing
This type of testing does not require any specific test tool, test strategy or plan, etc. It may be carried out simply through following activities:
- Evaluation of documented artifacts for both development and testing phase such as development strategy, plan, design, traceability matrix, test plan, test cases etc.
- Checking any type of spelling error or grammatical mistakes.
- Reviewing or Inspection to trace out any type of ambiguity or redundancy in the documentation.
