The Joy of Record and Playback in Test Automation - Louise Gibbs

Record and playback features are a really useful tool for automated test development. They allow code required to run automated tests to be generated quickly. However, there is an unfortunate misconception that it is only used by those with poor programming skills. 

 

I do not believe this is the case, as even those with excellent programming skills may choose to use record and playback as an initial code generator. 

 

I also believe that some may feel excluded from test automation because of their lack of programming skills. Record and playback features are an excellent way to introduce people to automated test development. 

 

Record and playback features do have their limits. There are some actions that cannot be recorded so need to be coded instead. Tests made up entirely of recordings can be awkward to maintain, and have difficulty recovering from failures. Therefore, any code generated from recordings needs to be changed to improve the maintainability and robustness of the tests. In this talk I will demonstrate how recordings and the code generated from recordings can be adapted when developing automated test cases.