I was reading Google's Testing Blog entry about how Google partitions its tests into small, medium, and large tests, and that not all of these tests are automated. Later in the entry the author goes on to say:
"Industry leading recording technology converts manual tests to automated tests to be re-executed build after build to ensure minimal regressions and to keep manual testers always focusing on new issues."
Does anybody know what recording technology Google uses? I'm familiar with Windows macro software such as AutoHotKey and AutoIt, but neither of them strike me as being able to save that much time (ie I suspect one would spend so much time trying to debug issues with the recording and getting it to re-run on arbitrary systems, etc. that they would quickly eat up any savings gained by being able to re-run the test more quickly on the next X runs).
I'm crossing my fingers hoping for someone with a little bit of inside information as to what Google actually uses for this, but if anyone knows any other pieces of recording technology that might fulfill the criteria in that quote, let me know.
Thanks in advance!
It turns out that the answer is in the comments of the same article (whoops.) Here is the quote from the blog post's author, James Whittaker:
"Our recording technology is called RPF, the Record Playback Framework. It's a Chrome extension that records to Java Script and does some pretty innovative tricks to solve some of the persistent recording issues on the web. If it helps, we do plan on open sourcing all this and working with other browser companies to make it more universal." [emphasis mine]
In the meantime until Google open sources the Record Playback Framework extension and makes it available as extensions on other browsers, one of the other commenters mentioned he got good results with Selenium, which might be worth looking into for anyone looking for a currently-available package.
*Edit: another currently-available package that seems to have a non-trivial following is TestComplete