Record and playback COTS

Questions
#1

Hello everyone,

My first topic post - YAY!

Down to business…

Background:
-Agile team
-Web based content (including windows file upload - apparently that’s important)
-Small team of tester (no coding knowledge and no budget time or resources to get it)
-Releases every two weeks
-JIRA used as CMS

Problem:
I am investigating incorporating a Record and Playback tool for providing business with reusable tests. I would love to know what other Record and Playback COTS packages you have all used, their pros, cons etc.

Notes:
I am currently testing the following COTS in my free time -
Cypress (Noted, req coding to work effectively)
Selenium (Noted, req coding to work effectively)
Tricentis Tosca
SmartBear test complete
AppPerfect Web Test
Applitools

All responses are appreciated and thanks in adv.

1 Like
#2

http://www.software-testing.com.au/blog/2016/06/01/why-record-playback-almost-never-works-and-why-almost-nobody-is-using-it-anyway/

Also, just Google “record playback fails.”

Progam-less automated testing is a dream. (Or is it a nightmare?)

#3

Thanks for the response and the article Burdette.

As mentioned in the article, the record playback is best used for highly-data driven testing.
This is my key purpose for it, to demo the first webpage, utilize it as more or less a skip script of the first webpage and reduce wasted manual data entry. It is the repetition of manually entering data into about 100 fields on each form submit just to get to where we really wanna test. I understand it is not the solution to all our automation testing.

Ideally, all I am looking for is a record and playback tool that will allow us to enter data into a web-form, upload a file and click next.

#4

Is the data you’re trying to enter always the same or does it need to vary depending on the test you are carrying out? Assuming it’s always the same (i.e. just dummy data to get you to the next page), and that the form rarely changes, I would think of using something like Selenium IDE - depending on the complexity of your solution you should be able to record a script to playback pretty easily, and at a basic level you can edit the script without needing any coding knowledge.

Also, have you talked to the dev team about this? There might be a way to add a test URL that uses pre-populated test data and takes you directly to the page you really want to look at. Depending on the nature of your site you could hide (or disable) that URL in production to prevent it being a security threat.

#5

Your scenario seems to be impossible without coding :slight_smile:…I will suggest to use Selenium with Apache POI or some other API which are readily available on googling for uploading/downloading files.Moreover,you can easily functions via googling, no need to write from scratch.
Also, for recording you can try Selenium IDE which may help you in some coding stuff.
Do let me know if you need any help!

Thanks

#6

I would add Telerik test studio ( or whatever name they are calling it these days to the evaluation list) Also a free selenium based one Katalon may work for you. Both connect to Jira .

“Ideally, all I am looking for is a record and playback tool that will allow us to enter data into a web-form, upload a file and click next.”

In that context , and it really depends on the website you are testing, this should be achievable. I disagree that this is an impossible task as I’ve done it twice with that tool once for the largest domain registrar and their start page set up. E.G., fill in all the forms to buy, set up, and upload a picture file ,save then verify .

Was mainly play and record, then set the input fields to read from an external spreadsheet;.

Also used other COTS during the eval. As long as the task is that basic and you have decent Identifiers in the program to grab I’d say yeah you can do it.

I do the same thing for the current company but with Selenium / Python because of different contexts, no budget, or other people that I have to train to use the tool. If the tool can’t do that it really would be useless:)

So while you may end up with an IDE running Selenium plus language of choice given your time-preference current needs most of the tools should do this task.

Also, note selenium ide has been discontinued when Firefox 55 and above dropped XPI extensions.

#7

Whilst you may be able to create a record and playback script for the demo purposes using a tool like Selenium IDE, it probably will not work as a long term solution for your actual requirement.

Tricentis Tosca is indeed a script less (i.e. you don’t have to write code) automation tool and might work well for your needs. I haven’t used this tool personally, but from what I have seen so far from other teams, the model based framework they use integrate well with the recorded script. It will not be cheap though.

You can still use Selenium WebDriver with relatively less coding by getting help from the development team to implement one of the open-source framework [1] and by learning how to use the framework.

[1] https://techbeacon.com/6-top-open-source-testing-automation-frameworks-how-choose

#8

A very late update - we ended up with Testim.io

How is it all going you ask…

So far we have automated our regression testing for two of our six key systems. This tool is amazing!

Key features:
Codeless (almost - I do a little JS for some tests)
Fast support team (always under 24 hours and normally only a few minutes)
Quick maintenance
They listen - they really listen to your ideas on how the software could be better.
For most tests, we can demo them live to a non-technical SME. They can see them, understand them and make suggestions on how to improve them.

Our setup:
Jira for SDLC
Git for code
Jenkins for CI/CD
Testim.io for test capture and UI automation demo
Selenium grid and nodes for running weekly, automatically.

1 Like