Testing videos are BIG. Jonathan Kohl says we need more testing videos for the sake of testing education. Pradeep Soundararajan records exploratory testing videos. Eric Jacobson is making bug movies with Windows Media Encoder. Adam White thinks no tester should be without a video recording tool. At a discussion in the Software Testing Club bug videos are mentioned right alongside text and images as a means to describe bugs.
I too record test and bug videos. Eating our own dog food, I use the Testuff Video Recorder quite often to add videos to bug reports. I do it when:
It’s easier to record a video of the bug than to write a lengthy and complicated description.
- Devs might not understand the bug’s lengthy and complicated description that I’ve already written.
- Devs won’t believe the bug reproduced at all.
- Devs will put off fixing the bug and won’t understand its severity unless they immediately see it for themselves.
- The bug is difficult to reproduce.
- Exploratory testing.
In fact, when I joined Testuff I thought that the idea of including a built-in test video recorder is genius and wish I had thought about it and used it myself from the dawn of my QA career. Seriously!
Unfortunately, the numbers don’t seem to agree with the hype. Out of our entire user database, it seems that barely a dozen companies record test videos on a daily basis. The numbers are too low for something that seems so useful and great.
The question is, why? Is the idea of recording test videos too new, one that needs more time for the masses to digest? Is it not so helpful after all to record test videos unlike what me and the other QA bloggers think? Is it maybe not comfortable enough and too time consuming to record test videos? Or have we got it all wrong and we should invest our efforts on some other means of helping testers other than test video recording?
I’m about to I’ve started a discussion about it at the Software Testing Club. Feel free to join in or alternatively leave a comment here what you think about test video recording.
I agree that video recording can be a great help when it comes to helping to highlight complicated defects, especially in those cases where reproducing the issue involves a large number of steps.
It’s also a very handy tool to have when you have geographically distributed test and development teams, where it’s not easy to ask someone to “come and have a look at this”.
Quite often though, once you open up for video recordings, it’s very tempting for certain types of people to include a video for EVERY reported issue, no matter how trivial the problem.
[…] my previous post about recording test videos where I asked why don’t people record them, I opened several discussions at several QA […]
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