Creative Web Automation: Generate User Guide with Automation Script

How to use an automated script to take screenshots and create an HTML user guide

A repost of my daughter’s article with permission. I added a few notes. This is also included in my “How to in Selenium WebDriver” series.

This article shows how I use automation scripts to generate a user guide for a website. For this exercise, I will use the sign-up process on WhenWise as an example.

Table of Contents:
· Why use an Automation Script?
· A typical Online User Guide 
· Automation Design
· Implementation
  ∘ Combine all into one Markdown document
  ∘ Convert Markdown to HTML
· What does it look like?
· Add Styling
· Full Script
· Considerations
· Review by Zhimin

Why use an Automation Script?

Typically, a user guide is generally written by a technical writer after the software is complete. However, the documentation often is outdated quickly as the app evolves.

Using automated scripts to generate user guides makes document-update much easier and quicker.