AUTO – DOCUMENTATION (Chrome Extension)

Before getting into technicality of AUTO-DOCUMENTATION, I would like to share the motivation behind creating such solution. There was an instance in regular sprint, where QA team was struggling with the bandwidth, due to lot of company critical projects in hand. After analysis we found out that lot of the time had been spent in writing manual test cases for the features in hand. Around ~50-60 test cases need to be written and document in a Sprint. So casually, a thought came to have a solution of implementing the AUTO-DOCUMENTATION which is a chrome extension, that will not only create the test steps automatically while browsing through the application but also the “created” test cases can be imported to TestLink test management tool, as TestLink is used as a test management tool company wide. Now let’s get deeper into what it is! AUTO-DOCUMENTATION is a chrome extension developed in-house to capture all the user interactions over the browser and document them:

• In form manual test steps.
• In xml format that can directly be imported to TestLink.

Extension has been written using pure java script with Chrome extension APIs. Installation: Extension comes out as binary file ie .crx file, which can directly be dragged to chrome or opera browsers in extensions (chrome://extensions) to install. After installation, user can view the icon of extension over chrome bar. Steps to start:

• In browser pane, click on the icon.

Enter the BASE URL to navigate and just go, and start recording, by clicking “go” button.

• Every user interaction will be RECORDED automatically at the backend.
• To ASSERT any content during test execution just right-click on particular object and assertion can be made for like link text, page title, page location, href, text value and so on.

• Comment can also be added for any steps, which will be reflected in recorded steps.
• To stop the recording, click on the icon again, and just stop recording by clicking on “Stop Recording” button. 

Then, window will show two options:

• Export recorded test steps — This exports the manual test cases in plain TEXT FORMAT.
• Export in TestLink format — This exports the test cases in xml format that can be imported to TestLink.

To conclude, and make things more clear please refer below video.

This solution made our team’s life a bit easy. Earlier we were taking around 2-3 days approx to document all test cases, but now with in approx ~1 day we are able to do the same, as test cases are automatically recorded while testing any feature in application.That means we are documenting the test cases automatically, ie AUTO-DOCUMENTATION 🙂

Techie people, please refer the code base.

Thanks!!