Context-sensitive help, Online help

Bhelpful

This script lets you map help content to page elements in a web app. But it’s more than just a simple web help mapper.

Consider this problem. As a help author, you want to provide context-sensitive help for your application’s users. Unfortunately, you don’t really know much about the user’s actual context. What were they doing before they arrived at the current location in the app? If you’re trying to describe the fields in a form to help them complete it, do you know what information they’ve already provided? Did they fill it in correctly? Which options have they selected?

This script lets you include conditions with your help content, so you can say when it should be displayed. For example, one page in your user web app contains a list of items. You want to show different help depending on whether there are items in that list or not. You can use conditions to do this. There are a number of pre-defined conditions you can use or you can define your own.

For more information, see the the Bhelpful GitHub repo.

 

QA, Testing

Qrm

Qrm takes the Pico flat file CMS and connects it to the Redmine project management web app to give you a quick-and-dirty test suite/issue logging system.

I built this because:

  • I needed to quickly move an existing test suite from a client’s internal wiki to a public site so that off-site testers could access it.
  • I wanted to be able to convert the existing unstructured content quickly into a human-readable format that could be easily parsed and turned into something web-ready.
  • Testers needed to be able to log issues quickly without having to muck around in Redmine too much. (i.e., not at all, except to log in, so that the Redmine API calls would work.)
  • I wanted to be able to quickly trace issues logged by the testers back to the test cases they were executing.

How it works:

  • Tests cases are written in Markdown text files and deployed to the Pico Markdown CMS.
  • Testers log in to Redmine (required by the Redmine API).  When viewing the test suite for the first time, testers enter their Redmine API key (taken from their My Account page) and select a project.
  • The Qrm theme’s main template includes a Log a Bug link. When a tester clicks this link from a test case, it displays a simplified issue reporting form. When the form is submitted, the bug is logged in Redmine, including a link back to the test case.

It’s not pretty. It’s not feature rich. But it does the job.

Still to do: add links to Redmine issues from the test cases, so testers can see issues already logged against each test case.

You can see Qrm live (not useful, unless you’ve got a Redmine account and project you can connect to): http://motusan.ca/projects/pico/praxis/test_suite/

Qrm theme source code: https://github.com/MotusanGroup/qrm