CSH Spy Program - What Are You Using?

[jackdeland]

I am documenting an application with a lot of failed Help calls. I will need some non-expert help (that is, an engineer or other SME who knows the software but not Help) to test all the modules, and am looking for a good tool they could use, on a budget of zero. Can you recommend a shareware/freeware tool for monitoring calls to Help that is user friendly, preferably with a good logging/reporting function?
TIA

[RamonS]

What help output are you looking at? If it is Web Help served up from a web server then any one of the many server log tools will be of help. Look for the 404 entries in the log files. There are also web crawlers that follow every link on a site (and typically download the page sources). Have one of those run against the help to get to anything that can be navigated to, but that potentially fails. Once done fix the issues and repeat the process.
The crawler that came up first in online searches is https://www.httrack.com/. As log analyzer this one might help: https://www.apacheviewer.com/, works for both Apache and IIS. I haven't used either of these tools, so they may be awesome or total crap.

Come to think....you explicitly asked for CSH. Are you looking for map IDs to point to the correct or an existing topic? That would be a bit different from what I described above. I'd create a list of all expected help calls in the application. Then go through them manually and check them off the list as pass/fail. Might want to use a record and play test automation tool that comes with Selenium so that the test can be repeated (and no, record and play is not a proper approach for test automation, but it will suffice in this case).

Either can be done with a budget of zero, but it will still be a lot of work. There is cheap, fast, and good...pick two.