Video as Part of your Software Release Process

Does this sound familiar? Your team’s “Definition of Done” means that every software release contains updates to the relevant documentation. Tech pubs is busy writing, capturing the new screenshots and watching for the final changes. And then the new version of your software is released. Time to celebrate!

Not so fast.

Now it’s time to re-record all those software videos.

Hopefully you have scheduled the resources you need to do this in advance (people, production facilities, tools). Weeks or even months later, you finally get to celebrate as the video updates are complete. Except that there were two or three software updates since you began and the videos are once again out of date.

Up until now, there have really only been three options for producing software videos.

1. First you use internal resources (like SMEs on your team) to do this. The challenge is that these resources typically have other jobs like training, support or writing code and are difficult to schedule.
2. Alternatively, you can hire an outside firm to make the videos for you. But this is often expensive and in either case above, you still run into the vicious cycle of keeping your video library up to date with every release.
3. A third option is to do nothing. Many software companies have given up on having a full library of videos and their customers rely on either the tech docs or a handful of more “conceptual” videos.

But isn’t this the tail wagging the dog? Less than ten years ago most QA processes were manual. And software was considerably more buggy than today (I left Windows after Vista and moved to a Mac when I couldn’t take the bugs anymore, and by the way we love Microsoft once again today - thank you Satya!). But then test automation frameworks (e.g. Selenium) became widely used and end to end automated testing became the standard.

Imagine instead if the approach was to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

So why do you still record videos manually? With Videate you can automate the production of software videos. You can use your technical documentation and programmatically generate videos with every software release; even if you release every day!

Think of Videate like your automated testing process. If Videate can’t produce a video with the new version of the software, then either your tech docs are not accurate or there could be a problem with your software (we sometimes catch bugs for our clients as part of the video generation process).

Are tech docs part of your release process? Best practices at companies like Google incorporate documentation as part of the software release process. They are integrated into the CICD pipeline. It’s time to add video as part of your “Definition of Done” with each release cycle.