Bret Pettichord Keynote Address
Why Software Quality Assurance & Testing Stack Exchange recommends it
Software Quality Assurance Stack Exchange answerers point people to it when explaining why record/playback test automation tends to fail and why a programmatic, object-oriented framework is the better approach.
Recommended by 3 people across 3 different months, 2011 to 2015.
What it is
A 27-minute keynote by Bret Pettichord at the 2011 Selenium conference, hosted on Sauce Labs' channel. He recounts why he grew frustrated with commercial vendors' record-and-playback sales pitches and how that feature came to dominate test automation tools.
What people said
Recommends Justin · 2011-05 · Software Quality Assurance & Testing Stack Exchange · on “How do I convince someone who's bought the Record-Playback line that object oriented framework is essential?”
Bret Pettichord's keynote presentation at this year's Selenium conference has a lot of great content that is directly on point. He talks in detail about why he got increasingly frustrated with the "playback and record" sales messages coming from large commercial tool vendors. To view his presentation on YouTube, click here [this video] . Skip ahead to 9:48. It's there that he starts to talk about the insights he and other leading thinkers on test automation experts were sharing with one another in the mid 1990's. He also talks about how the "record and playback" features were added in the pre-cursor to SilkTest. Adding record and playback features was, in Bret's view, almost entirely because it w
Recommends user246 · 2011-11 · Software Quality Assurance & Testing Stack Exchange · on “What testing procedures/software would you recommend?”
It is a good idea to explore automated testing, but it is difficult to create a system that will allow to you "press a few buttons or so to make sure everything's functioning as intended". Automation is rarely a complete or easy replacement for manual testing. Test automation requires a significant up-front investment and an ongoing maintenance cost. It also requires skills that a manual tester will not necessarily have. There are two ways to use Selenium: as a capture/replay tool or as a programming API. Capture/replay tools never work very well (watch [this video] for a good explanation) and I do not recommend using one. Selenium is a decent programming API for writing UI tests, but it requires
Recommends Chris Kenst · 2015-03 · Software Quality Assurance & Testing Stack Exchange · on “Test Automation Engineer, no record-playback?”
Test Automation is an extremely broad subject. It doesn't just mean performing regression testing or load testing with a specific tool, although that's often what employers want (it's easy to identify). The ability to create specific programmatic solutions to help you test is hugely valuable . Over the years automation tool vendors have tried to make the market bigger (create more sales) by lowering the barrier to entry for those tools. One of the ways they did this was through record and playback features. Bret Pettichord (who co-authored Lessons Learned in Software Testing), gives a fascinating background on record and playback in his Keynote address is this [this video] video . He talks about