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 recording in Playwright test scripts.# taken from PlayWright doc: https://playwright.dev/docs/videos
const context = await browser.newContext({
recordVideo: {
dir: 'videos/',
size: { width: 640, height: 480 },
}
});
I understand the above is optional. People, who think this feature is very helpful for developing/debugging automated tests, do not understand test automation, they are fakes or amateurs.
Table of Contents:· Real Test Automation Engineers do not have time to check videos
· Video/Screenshots reporting is tempting, but wrong
· Video/Screenshots reporting is bad
∘ 1. Counter-productive to resolve the issue
∘ 2. Slower test execution
∘ 3. Disk space, Cost and other complications
· If you do need Video reporting, there is a free and simpler way
