A Method to Test the Information Quality of Technical Documentation on Websites

In software engineering, testing is one of the cornerstones of quality assurance. The idea of software testing can be applied to information quality as well. Technical documentation has a set of intended uses that correspond to use cases in a software system. Documentation is, in many cases, presented via software systems, e.g., web servers and browsers, and contains software, e.g., Javascript for user interaction, animation, and customization, etc. This makes it difficult to find a clear-cut distinction between a software system and technical documentation. However, we can assume that each use case of a technical documentation involves retrieval of some sort of information that helps a user answer a specific questions. To assess information testing as a method, we implemented QAnalytics, a tool to assess the information quality of documentation that is provided by a website. The tool is web-based and allows test managers and site owners to define test cases and success criteria, disseminate the test cases to testers, and to analyze the test results. This way, information testing is easily manageable even for non-technical stakeholders. We applied our testing method and tool in a case study. According to common perception, the website of Linnaeus University needs to be re-engineered. Our method and tool helped the stakeholders identify what information is presented well and which parts of the website that need to change. The test results allowed the design and development effort to prioritize actual quality issues and potentially save time and resources.