Tailoring video recording to support efficient GUI testing and debugging

Automated GUI tests typically comprise of several test steps that are executed on the GUI before reaching a point of assertion. Comparing a longer and complex execution of a GUI test to its test instructions for debugging is a laborious task: re-establish the test environment, slow down test execution for human perception, and locate the currently executed test step. Video documentation of GUI tests for debugging purposes is already present in several industry tools. However, it is not optimized for effective documentation of on-screen actions nor synched with the executed test instructions. We present a video-based documentation of automated GUI tests that links the executed test case instruction to the on-screen response of the application under test. Screen recording is optimized for speed and memory consumption while all relevant details are captured. Additional browsing capabilities for easier debugging are introduced. Concepts of aspect-oriented programming are adapted for tracing of pre-compiled test case scripts. Our concepts are evaluated by a working implementation, a series of performance measurements during a technical experiment, and industrial experience from 370 real-world test cases carried out in a large software company. The limits of our implementation regarding video capturing and code tracing are explored with a specialized test frame.