Record and Playback and Session Replay tools may sound similar but they're wildly different.
Have you ever wondered:
What's "record and playback?" Is that like "session replay?"
"Record and Playback" and "Session Replay" (or "Session Playback") are two similarly named but different types of features used to help you deliver better customer experiences. Despite the names, each serves a vastly different purpose within the software development lifecycle ("SDLC").
Let's define them both, compare the two, and look at which solution will make the most sense for you.
What is Record and Playback?
Record and Playback is a common feature for automated user interface (UI) testing. With a Record and Playback tool, you can hit “record” and begin clicking on elements within a user interface on a website or web app. The Record and Playback tool will record your interactions so that later you can hit “play.” The tool will then recreate your interactions—every navigation, click, or keystroke–in the browser, exactly as if you performed them yourself.
These scripted interactions can then be manually kicked off to run later as needed. As the automated test runs, it will return error messages if the automated testing tool fails to complete one of the interactions as programmed.
Understood through the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework (JTBD), automated UI testing via record and playback does the job of repeating manual interactions as a check to make sure key functionality works as designed.
These test scripts can also be integrated with other systems to:
Run on command as part of a QA process
Run on demand as part of the build process, to prevent broken code from shipping to production (this is typically referred to as "automated testing within continuous integration / continuous delivery"), or
Run on a schedule from remote machines to monitor performance of a site or web application proactively, watching speed and reliability (this is typically called "synthetic monitoring" or "transaction monitoring")
What are some Record and Playback tools?
Common record and playback tools include:
Benefits and trade-offs: Record & Playback tools
Record and Playback tools can be helpful for:
Reducing manual work in QA and regression testing,
Preventing usability or performance bugs from going live, and
Quickly creating highly portable tests for ongoing performance monitoring
Here are some trade-offs to consider:
Recorded tests are limited. You can write transaction tests to run common user flows, but it would take a whole lot of recorded tests to get full coverage of every possible click path.
Recorded tests are fragile. Because the recorded test scripts often rely on specific CSS or XPATH to reference the correct elements with which to interact, minor changes to a site's code could cause the tests to fail when they run. Scripts must be actively and carefully maintained to reflect any changes to a site's navigation or user interface.
It's worth noting that some Record and Playback tools only work in designated browsers. If you're looking to import your recorded tests into a suite for ongoing monitoring, you'll need to make sure that the script output from your Record and Playback tool is compatible with your monitoring service. (For example, some synthetic monitoring solutions will accept Selenium IDE tests but not Java-based Selenium tests; it's important to know the difference!)
What is Session Replay?
Session replay tools help you:
Bonus: If you have a session replay tool that captures all user interactions