The documentation process in our community is broken. As long as we keep solely depending on a group of dedicated highly altruistic individuals it will never become sustainable. Documentation should be more like patches, contrib modules and themes: a contributable byproduct of our own (customer) projects.

We believe we have a solution that does exactly that.

Similarly features are not fully living up to their promise. While great for simplified deployment workflows, they have not provided the groundswell of collaboration that we originally thought they would enable. Feature's dirty little secret is that except for heavily productized environments, they are too inflexible. Any small change in the settings results in a lot of backpedaling to fine tune settings or requires a lot of upfront work to make a configurable feature.

In this session I will explain how we make walkthrough tutorials using the Selenium testing format and how such walkthroughs could transform the way we do documentation in Drupal. I'll also explain how we built the tool with Selenium, Drupal and Joyride JS.

The tutorials can be used to:

• Record end-user documentation
• Record a walkthrough that shows how to configure a module
• Document business processes performed on a website (e.g. for knowledge transfer)
• Increase conversions on complex forms
• Record site specific best practices (e.g. naming conventions in distributions)

This strategy allows you to:

• Record a walkthrough that is both a macro and documentation
• Play it, pause it, adjust some configuration and restart it inside your browser (so no more back and forward between your site and a tutorial)
• Collaborate on step descriptions
• Comment on steps (e.g. to give feedback to developers during User Acceptance Testing)
• String together multiple walkthroughs to document complex processes (e.g. when it contains multiple parts)