Record your tests

A recording of your test execution shows you how Tricentis Tosca navigates the tests you designed. This allows you to review your tests in action and uncover areas that may need some improvement.

TestCase recording is an early access feature that's still under development. Tricentis does not guarantee full functionality or usability in the current or future Tricentis Tosca versions.

This topic helps you to complete the following tasks:

Understand recording

Before you enable recording, make sure to review the following basics:

  • Tricentis Tosca creates one recording per TestCase and saves it in .mp4 format.

  • The recorder captures executions via ScratchBook and via ExecutionList.

  • Tricentis Tosca records the entire screen of the machine that executes your tests. If your tests aren't visible on the screen, they aren't visible in the recording.

  • You can still pause executions. However, this doesn't pause the recording.

  • The recorder starts up when the TestCase starts to run. Consequently, the recorder may miss the first one or two seconds of your execution. If your TestCase has crucial steps right at the start, we recommend that you add a brief wait time before that. To do so, create a new first TestStep from the Module TBox Wait.

  • Consider your disk space. If you run hundreds of TestCases on one machine, this machine must have enough disk space to store the recordings.

Enable recordings

To enable recordings, you need to modify the settings on every machine that should record executions. If you, for instance, use Tosca Distributed Execution, make sure to enable all Agent machines for recording.

Alternatively, you can create specific project settings for your repository. You only have to do this once; project settings apply to all workspaces connected to this repository.

To enable recording, follow the steps below:

  1. Go to Project->Settings->TBox->Execution recorder.

  1. Enable recording in the setting Enable Execution Recorder. You can choose to keep recordings of all executions or only of failed executions.

  2. Optionally, modify the settings Output Path and Output Filename Template.

Exclude individual TestCases from recording

If you enable recording, Tricentis Tosca records every TestCase you execute. Depending on how you enable recording, Tosca may only keep recordings of failed executions.

Alternatively, you can exclude TestCases from being recorded in the first place, such as playground TestCases or TestCases that are entirely invisible on the screen. If you want to avoid cluttering up your machine with recordings you don't need, you can disable the recording feature for those TestCases.

To do so, create a test configuration parameter (TCP) with the name AvoidExecutionRecorder and the value True.

You can create the TCP either for individual TestCases or folders. If you set the TCP on the folder level, Tricentis Tosca doesn't create recordings for any TestCases in this folder and all its sub-folders.

View your recordings

After the test run, Tricentis Tosca saves the recordings in .mp4 format to the folder that you specified when you enabled recording.

Tosca automatically adds a suffix to the recording name. Depending on the execution result, the suffix is either _successful or _failed. This makes it easy to find and review tests that had issues if you enabled recordings for all execution results.

Double-click a recording to watch it.

Note: Tricentis Tosca doesn't display the recordings in Tosca Commander.

What's next

If you ran your tests in ScratchBook and everything worked as planned, create ExecutionLists. ExecutionLists are your next step towards full automation. Click here to learn more about how to prepare and run tests in the Execution section.

If you ran your tests in ExecutionLists, learn how to analyze and process your results.