From Record and Play to Writing Automation Code — TestProject

There is a new player in the automation market that has a great proposition for manual testers.

TestProject.

It is a completely free, community-based solution that offers full automation capabilities to manual testers and SDETS.

Its record and play functionality is strong, the out-of-box-reporting well done, the code generation very good.

It works based on cloud and with the help of local agents for Windows, Mac and Linux.

It comes with automation frameworks for Java and C#.

TestProject is well rounded automation solution that should be very helpful for manual testers to get started with test automation.

Where should the manual testers start?

They should start with the record and play feature.

Record and play is a popular feature of many test automation tools.

Some people think that it is helpful, others do not.

My opinion is somewhere in between.

Record and play is not always helpful for building complex test automation projects because it has its limitations.

Writing test automation code in a programming language and using an automation framework is better.

But learning a programming language is a very difficult task if the manual tester does not have any programming knowledge at all.

Learning automation does not stop at the programming language.

Locators need to be well understood.

The automation framework as well.

A test runner is essential.

Given how many things need to be covered, record and play can be very useful to new testers that are interested in test automation.

It allows the tester to record a manual test, and see the recording details such as locators used for finding elements, actions for interacting with elements, timeouts, etc.

The tester can then make changes to all these settings, to the locators, actions, validations, and learn a lot in the process.