Online and offline quality checking

What does "automatic quality checking" mean?

First, we must define Quality. For the purposes of this article, let's see quality as the level of adherance to clearly defined quality standards.

Manual quality checking happens, for example, during review of data, where reviewers check the content for completeness, factual and lingual correctness, adherance to authoring guidelines etc.

Automatic quality checking is measuring the adherance to quality standards (represented as a set of rules) by means of software, and reporting broken rules. Not to mention, software can currently not - or at least not very well - check whether any technical information is correct, since the software does not "understand" the technical reality that's subject of the documentation. Automatic checking is, however, very good in mass checking formal rules.

Here are some examples of rules that software can evaluate, and that are common in authoring guidelines:

• Not more than seven bullet points in a list.
• Non-inline images must have a caption (even though the XML data model might not enforce it).
• Forbidden terminology must not be used.
• Sentences must not exceed a certain number of words.
• XML elements expecting numbers or dates as content must fulfill formal rules (correct separator characters in numbers, correct date formats, correct currency notation, etc.).

The above checks could, for example, be performed in the CCMS whenever an author checks a module in. If there are rule breeches, the author gets notified immediately and must correct the content. Only when no further rule breeches exist, the module can be passed on to (human) review.