Friday, April 5, 2013

Test Automation - Record and Replay

"I need a tester who tests my app very fast!", yells the test manager. This is the same tone we hear from every other test manager. When there are tight deadlines, 100s of customers using the product, one small change needs 3000 test cases to be executed. High time you start automating your test cases. Automate or lose your people and customers - it is your call now.

Take 1 minute to understand how automation works. Take electric fan. Before fan was designed, we used our hands and a fan made of palm leaves; our hand will swing that fan and you can feel the air breeze on your face. To feel that breeze, there is a physical movement. The electric fan automates that. It has the long wings, acting as the palm leaf fan; it rotates and that physical motion pushes air towards you. Well, how can we achieve that in software testing? Instead of me, a tool doing my physical actions such as click, type, drag and drop etc.? 

All tools use this record and replay feature. A microphone records sound waves and speaker reproduces the same; camera records light waves and screen reproduces the same. Same way, inside the test automation tool, there is a recording mechanism. This recording mechanism uses win32/64 API events. When you click on a button on some screen, a win api is generated and is broadcast across the system. That api will tell a single click, left button on mouse has happened on screen X on button with label as "Submit". Our room is full of radio waves, TV channel waves, mobile phone waves; yet we cannot feel or see or hear those? Why, because our eyes and ears are not tuned to detect those. The moment we have a radio and tune the frequency, we hear. The radio has a mechanism to detect and convert those waves to a humanly audible form. Same way, the testing tool has a mechanism to "listen" to those apis and tools produce script. 

The script lines will have the details such as Window name, screen object name, event, event details. e.g.

Notepad - myfile.txt, Edit-Find Menu, Click, left button/single
Find, Find text:, Type, Hello

The script is readable and understandable. When this script is replayed, the tool produces instructions to the operating system, via the reverse win apis, to perform the same action. The application will receive a click event on the object and it will respond to the same. If these apis are not exposed or suppressed, none of the tools will work.

Record and replay are the powerful features of every tool. Do not underestimate the same. The level 1 automation can be quickly achieved by recording every test case and replaying them one after the other. Record once and you can reply any number of times, without spending your time and energy. If you have 100 test cases, record all of those and replay those. While the tool is replaying, manually oversee the screens for any issues. This itself will save at least 30-40% of your testing time.

To see the record and replay (also known as capture-playback), click here to see the demo video.






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