Session recording
The session recording feature refers to the ability to get a video of everything that happened during a test's execution. It is not a capture-and-replay feature for creating the test script.
Loadero allows capturing a video recording of the test. After the test run has completed, a video recording will be accessible in each participant's report.
This recording is a significant asset when it comes to debugging your test script, or to simply confirm for yourself that the participant experiences exactly what you expected them to. This is something that a pass status and Selenium log contents alone might not necessarily ensure.
While Selenium logs are also a good source of information to debug a script, session recordings can help identify the issue faster. This is because Selenium logs are good at telling you what expectations were not met, such as an element not appearing in time. But they will generally not tell you much about why this expectation was not met. The broader context of a session recording - being able to see everything the participant saw at the time of failure - can help figure out the issue much faster.
In order to capture a session recording, the test must be executed in the "Session recording" test mode. You don't need to perform any more actions than simply selecting the appropriate test mode, Loadero will take care of the rest. You can read more about test modes here.
Recording the session requires more resources from the machine the participant is hosted on. Performance may worsen for tests where a recording is being filmed. Due to the overhead from having to record the video, we recommend against using tests executed in session recording mode to evaluate the performance of your application.
If a test was executed in any other mode but "Session recording", there will be no video recordings available for any of the participants. The mode must be "Session recording" at the time of launching the test run. If you run a test in a different mode and later update the test to use the "Session recording" test mode instead, then the old runs will still have no video recordings available.
Session recordings display a clock (UTC) in the bottom left, which you can also correlate with other sources of information like monitoring logs of the system under test. This way you can cross-check the recording with these other sources, and pinpoint exactly which action spawned a particular alert in monitoring, for example.
Screenshots
The "Session recording" test mode only supports tests of up to 10 participants, so for tests larger than that it is not an option. However, you can get some of the same benefits by using screenshots instead. The main concern of screenshots compared to a session recording is that you have to plan the screenshots out yourself. While a session recording will just show everything from beginning to end, screenshots will only be taken whenever the script demands it and one screenshot will only depict a single moment in time. This requires careful planning of where in the script the participant should be told to take a screenshot.
All of the supported frameworks in Loadero have a built-in command for taking
screenshots: saveScreenshot() for Nightwatch.js and TestUI,
save_screenshot() for Py-TestUI.