Screencasting as UI Testing

posted on 2005-06-02 at 11:03:20 by Joel Ross

I got the chance to listen to the return of the Gillmor Gang today, and it was pretty good. The guest was Adam Curry, and he did an OK job of keeping up with the intellect of the Gang. I did notice one thing though - either I'm getting smarter or this episode was more down to earth. I understood it better - maybe because the topic was something I am familiar with - podcasting and aggregators.

Anyway, I forget who mentioned it, and forgot to look at my Pocket PC to see what time the comment was made, but my guess is it was around the 35-40 minute mark. Anyway, they got to talking about screencasting, and Adam mentioned how they used it with Cast Blaster to watch users install it. Now, that's a very cool idea.

We talked about bringing in some outsiders and having them walk through the mortgage process to see how they interacted with the site, and see what things they didn't quite get. This would have been hard to do with more than two people, as we had one person who would be watching them, but with screencasting and a high level script for them to follow, we could have gone back and watched where they struggled.

On top of that, we could use that for testing. Instead of writing down the steps to reproduce an error, you just record a screencast (potentially with sound even) of how to reproduce the error, and attach it to your bug tracker.

Categories: General