Why Recording Videos for Automated Test Execution in Test Scripts is Wrong?

Avoid capturing automated E2E test execution into video, as it is a waste of time. Promoting video reporting is a sign of ‘fake test automation engineers’.

This article is one of the “Be aware of Fake Test Automation/DevOps Engineers” series.

In Automated End-to-End Testing, many so-called ‘cool’ features like the ones below are mostly unnecessary.

• Record-n-Playback
• Object Identification
• Recording test execution (video/screenshots)

Some commercial test automation tools, such as Ranorex, highlight a ‘cool’ feature: capturing the whole test execution video (also known as video-reporting). A variation of this feature is taking a sequence of screenshots after each test step. These so-called test automation tools all failed.

Recently, I saw a couple of articles comparing Selenium WebDriver vs Playwright. The authors claimed one main Playwright’s advantage (over Selenium) is Video-Reporting. This is very wrong! (as a web test automation framework, raw Selenium WebDriver is much much better than Playwright, in every way).

WARNING: bad! set up…