As quality assurance assistant and junior developer for Semantico I spend a lot of time developing and implementing QA tests. Testing an e-publishing website can be time consuming.
Even a simple test of search functionality has several steps; go to the designated URL, log in, search, verify the search results, check hit highlighting, start an advanced search, verify those results, check hit highlighting again, start another search with a different term… well, you get the idea. It’s repetitive. And there are many aspects to test, not just the search facilities.
After a while you might find yourself thinking that there should be a more efficient way to test your website. You can hire someone to do all your QA tests for you of course. But will they test your website in an efficient way? Will they follow your test cases to the letter; the tests you have spent hours designing, editing and documenting? If only there were an automated tool to do all this – and one which did not require a degree in Computer Science to operate. view this post »
Written and delivered in partnership with Andrea Powell from CABI, this presentation is a case study of lessons drawn from the CAB Direct project, and highlights issues which are relevant across the board for publishers delivering online content. This includes looking at how to maximise value in the design of taxonomies and coding systems, how designing and improving user experience on the product side can lead to more stringent data quality requirements and some design strategies to minimise ongoing operational costs when designing data transfer workflows between systems. We also look at innovation in the design of machine level API interfaces.
You can watch the full presentation (45 mins) given to the STM E-Production Seminar on 3rd December in Kensington London. Please note that the video will be displayed in a new window.
Taking inspiration from the stars (currently obscured by a thick layer of snow-clouds over Brighton) we bring you the online publishing tech buzz for 2010: what’s up, what’s down – and what’s coming back for a second time around.
This isn’t completely a matter of personal prejudice. We’ve taken as a starting point the Gartner hype curve, which charts emerging technologies as they ascend the Peak of Inflated Expectations, plunge into the Trough of Disillusionment, then haul their way painfully back up the Slope of Enlightenment - finally reaching the Plateau of Productivity. We’ve simply selected the technologies most relevant to online publishing, and added a few others based on our own experience (and personal prejudice). view this post »
Thanks for all the positive comments about these posts, and especially to Steve Weissman, who contributed this short summary, which has a pleasing conciseness I failed to achieve in the original pieces:
‘… KM is a business practice, e-learning a teaching (learning) technique, online publishing a distribution mechanism. The commonality? The underlying enabling technologies for each are largely the same.’
In my previous post on this subject I addressed the similarities and differences between the worlds of online publishing and knowledge management. In this post I’d like to talk a little about how the worlds of knowledge management and e-learning often collide, before discussing how both relate to online publishing.
I recently helped to edit an article on unifying e-learning and knowledge management for a learning and communications company. The article addressed the silo problem within large organisations that divides the two disciplines of Knowledge Management (KM for short) and Training and stops them functioning in useful collaboration. Collaborating usefully is something which, on the face of it, these two disciplines ought to be able to do. After all, both have responsibilities in a similar area: i.e. in what an employee knows, and how that employee can be helped to do a particular job better by knowing new or different things. view this post »
Richard Padley
Managing Director,
Semantico