Why I Record All My Test Sessions – A picture is worth a thousand words

In communication, how do you convince others and get their trust? Of course, every word is convincing when it is right, and there must be clear evidence of what you want to convey to others.

In a project, the tester must ensure that the product they are assigned to test is of the best quality in all aspects, whether a functional test, exploratory test, ad-hoc test or even the penetration test applied. During these testing, most of the time the tester will focus on the planning and designing test cases, the generated test data or the take note the expectation about the input and output. But totally will not take notes or record what actually happens, especially in the random tests. If the bugs happen in the random testing, it’ll be hard for the tester to remember the cases to reproduce these bugs later. How can the tester remember what they did, and when randomly? How does the tester answer the question “How was this tested?”

So the tester should have evidence in hand, just as the offender would not have been arrested without proof of their criminal behavior, and the problems in the test were similar. But, how can there be evidence that can ensure that the “offenses” are from the mild to the severe extent of the problems and the number of problems or the time and place where the problem takes place? The simple answer is to record. Since it is possible at different times or places, “offense” may or may not take place, so if there is no clear evidence of it, no one will believe and ignore it.

For example, when examining a human resources management software, it is important and urgent that the right access of the employee account in the system, as there is sensitive information that only the high level management member can access. The vulnerability of the system on the records stored on the software must be highly secure and have limited user access. Suppose that, the tester as a normal user is not assigned any special authority to see that information, then suddenly, the application is updated to a new version and causing a bug that can let the normal user to access – In a bad situation, the user can change, steal, delete, or stream this information out of the organization. This problem is of course an urgency and high priority and should be reported to the PO and tell the developers immediately, but when describing the problem verbally and re-executing the action is not easy and it takes much time such as you may deploy a old version and then update it to the new version again.

This might lead to a situation where you will lose credibility in the team, causing communication difficulties between the tester and dev, etc. That is why the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is true, so the recording figure out what it brings is the actual image that has taken place, which helps to show that problem and can be prevented or corrected in time for the tester to feel more confident in the work simultaneously. High performance, trust from colleagues, customers and furhtermore, the data you collected can provide additonal value for analytics.

When to record?

In reality, problem can happen anywhere and at any given time, by applying context-driven testing you can be sure of where things are going exactly at any given moment. For example, to switch browsers during testing or switch to other operating systems or versions, etc. Similar to risk-based testing, when you determine the priority of a product that you control so when the product is in the process of stability you may not need to spend too much time on regression testing but still ensure the quality of your product. Those test actions can be recored to keep track of what the user does and what happens in response to every action: every move, the screen displays, and the messages. This gives you a fairly straightforward way of recording what happened when you tested.

When you need to communicate or convince the team about the problems you have seen, you just have to open the record of what you’ve been shooting, of course, no one can deny it, that would convince your team and your credibility in the work is increased.

At MeU-Solutions, we have a One2Explore tool to assist manual testers to record their test cases. To optimize the efficiency of the product, before testing and using the regression, we encourage the testers to preview the product to be tested, the functions or things to focus on the test, then use the experience and their knowledge of writing test ideas so that they can cover most everything in testing.

This tool supports to record all the actions of the user when the user clicking and typing keywords on the keyboard on all the applications that are running on the desktop, as well as support for the Android system on the smartphone.

Recording setting

The charter of the tester

The data is recorded during the test

The problem was recorded during the test

Most of the testing activity is captured with the detailed data about your system, application, test session… the information is perfectly suited for regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare, which require detailed evidence of testing.

With high quality test evidence can help to protect you from potential problems, from unexpected results which are found in a few iterations or builds after this was tested or in production. Additionally, the testing record will keep you informed about exactly how testing is being carried out.