Gartner identifies hyperautomation as a digital trend for 2022

Manual documentation is redundant

Currently, many businesses face challenges with creating usable documentation and user guides that can easily explain functionality, requirements, and specifications to others in the organisation.

Documentation is required to adopt, deploy, and use technology and to implement or manage updates, fixes, or changes to the software. Users are expected to  understand complex code. They often find that data fields have been omitted from reports for security reasons and that the developer’s coding methods can differ. This can affect the quality of comments and in turn, would affect software quality assurance (especially if they were to hand the information to another person to action).

The move to agile development has made documentation a far bigger challenge than it was as the velocity of change in environments means documentation is out of date before it has been written. This is less of an issue when applying the waterfall methodology which aims to define any requirements before development, allowing documentation to be created in one go.

Surviving an agile environment

In order to survive in the agile environment, organisations need to have an automated document system that keeps all desired documentation up to date instantaneously.

For a business to be able to scale faster and cost-efficiently, automation can help develop and test software faster and easier than ever. More and more businesses have started to recognise the hyperautomation trend and are finding great benefit in being able to free up valuable resource time by automating tasks.

In highly regulated industries, manual documents can particularly be a cause for concern as the business need to do all they can to reduce risks and have the ability to create accurate and good quality documents for compliance. Different types of documents are created through the whole Software Development Life Cycle from planning, analysis, design, development, and testing. The types of documentation will include software, product, system, process, user, and end-user but manual creation of the documentation can be time-consuming and error prone.

The documents should help to communicate information about the software to individuals and different teams. As it passes through different people in the business, the business needs to be able to update or revise each version with approval from the responsible authority.

Paving the way forward with automation

Automated documentation can be created quickly and allow users to comment and make tracked changes such as refactoring of codes, screenshots, and visuals can be used to make it clear and easier to understand information and follow instructions.

Businesses can reduce risks of failing to comply with regulations or compliance and can provide a single source of truth when updating information and documentation for multiple teams working on the same project. Automation enables collaboration between teams and individuals, offers better visibility and increased insight into outcomes.

To find out how AutomatePro can help with you create multiple style templates, from user guides and training reports to upgrade risk reports, requirements and acceptance documents or test execution reports, please get in touch by calling us on +44 (0) 20 3473 2986 or email us: hello@automatepro.com