Dear Record & Playback,

I know that it’s been a while since we’ve spoken, but I’ve been thinking about you lately. It’s time I get some things off my chest. Remember when I was just a kid in the world of test automation? Seems like it was just yesterday. I was walking past some cubes in an office building when I saw you testing an application all by yourself, with no one else in sight. I thought I’d seen a ghost and had to do a double take to make sure it was actually happening.

You were the coolest thing in the world to me. Immediately you took me under your wing and showed me so many new and wonderful things about automation scripting. With you, I quickly learned the automated test tool language. We were inseparable.

That was years ago, though, and everything’s different now. Thinking back on those good times makes me a little remorseful about the way things turned out. For years I blamed you, but as time progresses I see that perhaps I was too hard on you. My desire is for us to move forward into a more positive relationship, but first we must step back and see where we went wrong.

For me, your dishonesty was at the heart of the rift. When we first met, you made a lot of grandiose promises about what you were capable of, and I believed you. You promised effortless automation by simply recording the execution of manual test steps in the application. You promised seamless overnight runs by playing back that recorded script. You promised that automated test analysis only required a brief inspection of an easy-to-read report. You even promised to reduce automated test maintenance to the click of a button. I foolishly believed you when you said that click would correct the script with an update run or by simply re-recording a small portion of a test script.

Slowly, however, the veil began to lift from my eyes as I watched recorded tests fail miserably when played back--minutes after being created. I saw poor coding standards and redundancy grossly expand analysis and maintenance to epic proportions. I watched automation efforts fail throughout the industry due to people underestimating the total cost and overestimating the return on investment.

At first I thought it was all due to misunderstandings, but then I saw how you pushed the damaging untruths about test automation. You aligned with and allowed yourself to be used by many dishonest tool vendors. At that point, I no longer wanted to associate myself with you. I went on a crusade to alert others that relying on you would be detrimental to an automation effort that seeks to create a robust, maintainable suite of automated tests.

I never fully abandoned you, but our relationship was forever altered.

Part of me still feels justified for taking a strong stance against you. It was necessary to counter the false claims about your capabilities! However, I do think there’s a way we can mend our broken relationship.

Instead of allowing you to be continuously misused by those motivated to achieve their sales quotas, I want to help lead you back onto the path of righteousness. I can help you and others understand the good you bring to our world when used properly within an effective automated testing process--even to test automation efforts that value maintainability. But you’d have to try and fit within the following process:

1. Learn the application and the object dynamics
2. Address the desired quality attributes
3. Create a directory structure
4. Create initialization and configuration parameters
5. Create reusable procedures
6. Develop tests with reusable procedures

The first two steps are part of the automation pre-planning. It is important to understand the environment, application functionality, and the application’s unseen dynamics. These things impact how tests are developed and executed. Then determine how best to handle the desired quality attributes (i.e., scalability, usability, reusability, flexibility, and robustness) prior to structuring the automation framework.

The third step involves identifying and creating the physical structure that stores and manages the automation components (i.e., folders, scripts, data files, and libraries). Afterward, you’ll create the initialization and configuration parameters that set up and stabilize the tool and the environment during test execution. Then you’ll create automated procedures (a.k.a. functions) that increase modularity and maintainability, which will be used by several automated tests. Finally, combining the reusable procedures from the previous step to create automated tests marks completion.

Much of the automation work takes place in the first and fifth steps, and it is here that your capabilities are most useful. By doing some simple recordings in the application, test automators can review the properties that are used to uniquely identify each object that is automatically captured in the object repository. Then, by playing back those recordings under various conditions, much may be ascertained about the various dynamics associated with those objects.

An automator may find out that certain properties require the use of regular expressions, or that different properties need to be used. Based on how objects are recognized, the automation approach may need to be altered in order to establish proper verification points. By quickly understanding the object dynamics, you can help us avoid many of the object-related problems encountered during test automation.

During the fifth step, you can capture most of the basic actions that will take place in the application. By automatically recording these actions into the procedures as opposed to recording them directly into the automated tests, the automator has a much greater ability to implement good coding standards, and good exception handling and modularity. Then the automator can build robust automated tests by combining the procedures to produce the desired test sequence.

So, Record & Playback, I apologize for shunning you in the past. If I protect you from being exploited, and make sure you’re used properly within a well-defined automation process, we’ll have a good relationship. Now I will take you under my wing, just as you took me under yours all those years ago.

Yours,

Dion