I was working in the technical writing department, but was often “on loan” to testing for manual tests. At some point they decided to make it official and put me in testing–including working with WinRunner.
At first it was just a matter of running someone else’s test and evaluating expected results. For this, the interface was clear enough for most functions. When I had questions, the online help actually… helped. Eventually I started to learn TSL (I have basic knowledge of C). While I was going through the tutorial, I was impressed on two levels.
- As a new user, I felt like the information was presented clearly in an effective order. When I finished, the rate determining step when writing scripts was my own programming background, not the tutorial.
- As a technical writer, I really appreciated the way the tutorial dealt with the age-old questions of “what if the user doesn’t start at the beginning” and “how can we repeat information for someone who forgets how to do something, while not slowing down more advanced users”. The format made it very easy to pick out the new information at each step.
When I was writing scripts, I used the online help to set up something that worked with an Excel file. It was pretty painless. 🙂 And it was something that wasn’t used in our other tests–I think the fact that I had actually read the documentation helped me to see that this was the perfect solution.
Lisa Sageev
Tester, e-sim