User manual is still needed. However, it should as simple as possible. The real question is, what the content of user manual that can be as simple as possible and provide simplicity guide for the user. This article will guide it for you. If you are Scrum or XP user, this agile user manual is for you. This is the improvement of my previous post Creating Agile User Manual (ridilabs.net)
What you Put in Your Manual
Technically not everything on the DevOps work item. You can put the essential information such as
Product vision, mission, and success criteria
Product version and history
Product actor. Who will use the product?
Product feature. List of features
Product user story
Product guide how to use the user story.
User story limitation and rules
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Why your Customer does not read your user manual?
If you still wondering why the user manual is never read by the customer, or why your customer still asks to you although you already have the user manual. this article is for you. On this article, we discuss a new way to create user manual by using SnagIt. Snagit is more than Screenshot application. it helps you to create screenshot for your manual, create a step by step video, or event simple vlogging to introduce yourself. Today, we have a mission to create modern user manual with Snagit.
Snagit can help you to create more appealing user manual in order to increase the user awareness. Of course, building fancy user manual is not solve the entire problem since we also need to create agile user manual. This article is second article from our first article "Creating Agile Manual". If you don't know what Agile user manual is and why you should care, you can visit the previous post. So, what is the characteristic of Agile user manual is?
Providing the user multimodal communication. i.e. the user can read the manual, view the visual illustration, or see the video to finish the task.
Providing interaction. i.e. the user can comment and ask you about the specific topic regarding the user guide
Available online. The modern user manual should be accessed through online through web.
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How Snagit can help?
Snagit can help you to create better look and feel in your agile user manual by providing some of key features such as:
Providing you multimodal recording
Snagit 2021 can help you to record
Onscreen video with better compression and quality ratio. This is the most feature that I love so much. Comparing with the other screen recording software, Snagit is clearly the winner of the compression vs quality. It provides you low size video without compromising the quality.
Screenshot. You can record screenshot just like the casual print screen. However, Snagit provides you a better way to screenshot anything that cannot see in the screen, such as your scrolled content. As a web developer of Single Page Application, Snagit 2021 will help me to screenshot the whole web page.
Creating gif video. If you want to record the video with less than 30 seconds, you can export the video to 'tiny size' animation.
Providing you a getting started template to create your manual
In Snagit 2021, Snagit Editor provides you a ready to use template to create the user manual. You can choose from the basic 2 steps, 3 steps, till 5 steps. What a good in Snagit 2021 template is:
Built in usability in mind. The template guides you to create Agile user manual in usability and avoid 'overload information'
Supporting real world scenario such as
User manual
Request for changes (before and after)
User interface explanation (for poster and quick guide)
Enriching visual cue in your User Manual
In the past, I should create a manual shape and put a number on it. Snagit 2021 provides you more than a shape. For example, my favorite one is a Step. Step provides you a visual cue for your manual. It makes your user manual is better. You just need click your mouse and the label will be automatically assigned.
Reusing and Managing the Information
If you are creating a user manual for more than one customer, you face situation when you need to do screenshot similar steps (i.e. login to Azure portal). With Snagit 2021, you can manage your reusable library and tag it with useful keyword. You can change the view from Capture to Library and you can reuse your existing slide. The library give you a good classification for your previous capture such as images, video, or animation gif. And of course you can search with your tags (i.e. Azure)
Sharing to the others App
After using the Snagit, you can share the content to make you more productive such as.
Sharing the content to your google drive so you can insert it into a blogger-based site.
Sharing the content to SharePoint or Slack to get a feedback from your teammate
Sharing the content to Camtasia so you can edit the video
Snagit support major application that might need to use it
That's it! Let me know if you need detail tutorial about how to use Snagit in Bahasa Indonesia!
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The challenges with our user manual
User manual is something that is sometimes forgotten. Even though we know that a person's understanding of one system is different from another. We sometime neglect the benefit of user manual for sharing knowledge between the development team with the end-users. The challenges of the current user manual is:
Video user manual – visually rich!
Slow on update. Making a video for user manual is great, but the effort to create a video for something that 'constantly' changes is huge. (-)
There is a lot of effort to design, create, render, and share the video. (-)
Hard to find the specific information if you do not split your video or indexing it (-)
Document user manual – completed and easy to maintain!
the user does not read your document. They only receive as part of your invoice. (-)
Some users are too busy to read the user manual. They tend to learn the application through learning by doing (-)
The demonstration is though through document, you should do a lot screenshot for your document (-)
In app user manual - interactive and integrated with your app!
The user manual is not easy to update since it should follow the build rules in the application (-)
The user manual is separated in several menus, sometimes it hard to maintain (-)
In app user manual needs extra effort in development side. Context based, wizard, tool tips adds the task for development team (-)
The Agile User Manual
Agile user manual is an initiative to make user manual as a live document with several principles
Easier to deploy and to update
Providing quick problem-solution
Rich in content you can put video, document, or even tweet from your company update
The idea of agile user manual is providing the user live document with better usability and access.
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How to create Agile User Manual
This is an example how the agile user manual is created
Choosing the 'live' platform that can be shared to your users. For example, we are using Microsoft Sway as our 'live' platform https://sway.office.com/
Choosing the easy to use video creation platform for your screensharing. For example, we are using Techsmith Snagit 2021
The steps that we can do is
Create a Sway document with your company account (not the personal one)
Share the sway document with the others development teams
Create a layout. Each layout is a slide for certain functionality
Create a short video with Snagit. You can create less than three-minute videos for delivering the functionality of your application bases on a layout
Put the short video into the sway document
Share the Sway document to your customer
You can see the tutorial in the next post. Enjoy!
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When developing a software, you might think what is the better way to acquire the requirements. If you learn software engineering you might be remember about software requirements or requirement engineering. It is a long journey to learn about requirement engineering. You should read a lot documentation, create requierement template for your client, filling the document and discuss within the client. If you have done already you might be agreed that sometimes the 30 pages requirement page won’t satisfies the client if they change they mind. You put a lot of effort to create the req’ document but in the end is useless when client changes his mind. In this article, I will share you about what you need to know to create better requirement based on my thought on ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) minimalist. Please note, that ALM minimalist is not a formal method like waterfall, but is an Agile technique that simplify the ALM. If you akready use the Visual Studio Online, you might be familiar with Features, Stories, and Tasks on the Work Tab as shown in figure below. In the picture we have features, stories, and tasks. We will describe it in this post each element of that to make your requirement simpler and adapt to change. Starting with Features. If you ever read a good book about FDD (Feature Driven Development), you might be remember about features. Feature is the unit of the “things that it wants by the customer’. In the ALM Minimalist, feature is simple statement that explicit the client need. On the Visual Studio Online, you can add features by clicking the work tab and click the new button. Here are several sample of feature The simple patterns of Feature is Features = Action + Object Feature should also provides additional information such as Who owns the feature. it means who will responsible with that feature The prioriy of the feature (1 for high priority, 3 for less priority) The iteration when the feature will be develop. In Visual Studio Online, you will get a lot filed to fill by clicking the feature. However, ALM minimalist encourages you to keep it simple by avoiding fields Exploring Features into Stories So you have features, you can break down into stories. For example, if we have a feature called “Managing The Payment of a Course” you might have several stories such as Paying the course using wire transfer Paying the course using credit card Paying the course using invoice from company As you see, story explains the feature more detail based on several constraint and condition based on customer needs. On Agile book such as eXtreme Programming Explained or others, you will find that the user story has a pattern like below User Story = as a (actor) I want to (action) so that (benefit) for example: as a member I want to pay the course by credit card so that I can join the online course right away In Visual Studio Online, you can do that easily by clicking the stories menu. However, if you feel too complex when writing the formula, you can follow the simple statement such as “Paying the course using credit card”. You can make the story unambigous by adding several information such as Work assigned to (Story Owner). it covers who will do the story Risk (1 high - 3 low) Story Point. Story point is number of estimation that will be done through planning game session Description. It shows the detail of the story. It is just like usage scenario of the story that described using words Storyboard. It shows the flow of the story and the user interface. it uses Powerpoint to create the storyboard Iteration. The iteration shows when the story will be worked by the story owner, Story is a part of feature. Therefore, you can see the story below of a feature on Visual Studio. In the Figure, it is shown that the story name is ‘simple statement’ about the story, and the desriptions uses the “user story format”. You can add the additional information such as data field and detail information on a storyboard Doing the user story action on a task Task is the lowest unit of the work. Task is assigned to an agile member. Task represents the detail of user story. For example if I have story “see the student list”, I might be have 2 tasks such as showing the student list that already paid the course, showing the student that not already paid. If I have 20 story point, each task should be have not more than 20 point. Task is not only about the activity that contains development activity but also others activity such as design, requirements, deployment, and etc. Fortunately, in Visual Studio Online you can create task and assign them with several field such as figure below Conclusion ALM Minimalist is an agile technique that has a purpose to simplify the requirements engineering activity. it proposes the three main components which are Feature, Story, and Tasks (FST). The FST can be adopted easily on Visual Studio Online using Agile MSF template. Good Book to Read
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Enterprise inlines the solution within business. It means any action that create a solution should provide values. Values mean productivity, revenue gain, or cost effeciency. Simply said that values related directly with the business. Last month, we should create a software engineering framework based on tight project management and approval model, as fine as minimalist approach. The proposed solution is called ALM minimalist. So how we create an ALM minimalist, here are the steps: We select the starting template. In this step we are using MSF for Agile. MSF for Agile is choosen because the mature is in the middle between Scrum and CMMI We breakdown and make an effor to understand their project management habits. It is including their approval models and validation model We compose the artifact that minimalist enough As a result we get the templates as a follow: Vision and Scope document Functional Specification Document Master Plan Document Project Execution Reporting document Project Delivery Acceptance form Project Closure document That’s it, hope it will help you to compose a minimalist document for ALM purpose
Recently, Microsoft Pattern and Practices released a good book about testing for continuous delivery with Visual Studio 2012. This book covers an Agile process in terms of testing and continuous improvement of your software by testing it iteratively. As mentioned in their pages
This book is aimed at test engineers, managers, developers, and folks interested in understanding the changing world of test. Over the last several years, software testing has changed a great deal. In the past, test plans were on paper, filed away and out of sight. Today they are—or can be with Visual Studio—living documents, as manual and automated tests are integrating into the test workflow supported by the test infrastructure. Today you no longer have to set up physical boxes; instead you can set up and automate virtual environments composed of virtual machines to meet your testing environment needs. With Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, the pain of dealing with a heterogeneous test infrastructure is reduced, the cost and effectiveness of testing a product is improved, and regression testing becomes cost effective instead of a nightmare. Knowing how to test is important, but understanding how this new infrastructure is changing the business of testing and software delivery is critical. Today's businesses require nimble teams that can support continuous delivery and deal with updates and bugs in an agile fashion. It's what your customers have come to expect. In this guide, we follow a team as they move from a conventional approach to testing towards one more suited to the needs of present-day development. We see how they address the costs and the pain of their old methods by adopting the testing infrastructure of Visual Studio 2012.
You can download the book here
Having a good time to learn you can bough a good book about testing and Agile here. Buy one and you never regret it.
This is the third tutorial that focused to implement UML as a lite modeling based on Agile process. The main purposes of component diagram is to propse a solution based on the functional and the business process. Furthermore, the component diagram will help developer team to see a big picture before they build a prototype. In this Indonesian video you will learn.
What is component diagram and why we need to build it
Component dagram as the software component architecture
Building component diagram in Visual Studio
After viewing this video, you can create a component diagram and knows how to improve your design vision into higher level such as prototyping,
enjoy
This post is a sequel of the previous post “Agile modeling 101-Building Use Case Diagram”. This post assumes that you already gather the requirement and the actor of the proposed solution. This post will guide you how to explore business process that needed to develop to capture essential part of system business process. The video will tell you the rest, some of the key point for this video are:
Activity diagram captures step by step what user or system will do for a functionality described in use case.
Ideally one use case will have one or more business process that described in activity diagram
the activity diagram can be formatted to become usage scenario that lead as an ingredient for building user manual
That’s it, enjoy the video
Building codes is a complex activity. Therefore, we need to build a software in a rapid way without sacrificing a basic documentation for the software. In this article, it will share an approach to build a software through UML modeling but eliminating several verbose step.
This article point several activities that, we must do to build a software in a top-down model through UML modeling. These three steps which are
Gathering the requirement using Use Case
Understanding the business process using Activity Diagram
Building the software architecture using component diagram
You can read the article in Indonesian language at here
or you read it online at Microsoft KB here
Simple thing should be simple, complex thing should be possible. Many of the system start from small and increasing its complexity and become big and bigger. This Indonesia article will tell you two facts which are:
Visual Studio is your foundation to build any kind of system either small or big system.
Team Pulse and TFS will support you when you need a set integration many of Visual Studio
You can download the article here