1.1.3 Recorded Tests

Possibly the most popular approach to automated functional testing is macro recording, that is, recording a user's actions for later playback. The appeal of this approach is the apparently quick success that can be seen: a test script can be quickly recorded and played back, giving the impression that automated testing is nothing more than recording a manual test.

However, this approach fails to meet the needs of large or long-term software projects for the following reasons:

In essence, a recorded script is not an automated test. It must be refactored to remove errors and redundancies, to make its component parts modular and reusable and to insert the intelligence of the manual tester to make the test robust. Once all this has been done, there is probably very little of the original recording left, and a great deal of development work has been done to refactor the script.



Copyright BREDEX GmbH 2011. Made available under the Eclipse Public License v1.0.