Skip to main content

Document Test Steps with Problem Steps Recorder

Software testers often feels the need to record their test steps. This helps in reproducing their bugs. But what if there is no recording tool readily available at your disposal? If you are using Windows 7 or above, Problem Steps Recorder tool is an answer. Read on to find out more about this.
Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) captures the steps performed by the user on an application as a set of screen shots with a text description of where they clicked. The capture can be saved as a file that can be used to reproduce and troubleshoot the problem. This tool is built in for Windows 7 and above operating systems.
You can start this tool by going to Start Menu and typing ‘psr’ query. Start recording by clicking ‘Start Record’ option. Now perform the steps to reproduce your problem. The Problem Steps recorder will capture all the steps performed by you and log information such as mouse clicks, text entered, program opening, closing, etc.
Click ‘Stop Record’ option once you are done with recording. You can then save the recording as ZIP file. All the problem steps are listed in .mht file which is extracted from ZIP file. It should look as below image.

Problem Steps Recorder
You can also add your comments when recording is in progress. Click “Add Comment” and select the part of the screen that you want to comment on, using the mouse. Then type your comments in the comment box and click OK.
We believe this is really nice tools for manual testers. Apart from providing screenshots and description of steps, it also provides time of each of the recorded actions. This could be especially helpful in documenting performance issues.
Give this tool a try and let us know how did you find this useful.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Performance Testing in the Cloud with JMeter & AWS

JMeter is a wonderful tool  to stress test your website and  your application architecture , however if you are trying to simulate many users (>1000) one JMeter instance (=pc) will not be sufficient. You will have to set up a JMeter cluster with multiple machines. JMeter is capable or running  distributed tests , but it comes with limitations. Since most of us don’t have multiple servers laying around somewhere, we usually go to cloud service providers like  AWS , spin up a couple of  EC2 instances  and turn them off whenever we’re done. Here is the problem, JMeter uses  Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation)  to communicate to its slaves, but these connections require all machines to be on the same subnet and this is not feasible with EC2 instances. Below, I explain how to get around this problem using a 3 node configuration in AWS to execute tests. I assume that you have a written the test already and have the .jmx file r...
Post a Comment
Read more

JMeter Exceeded Maximum Number of Redirects Error Solution

While running performance test, JMeter allows maximum 5 redirects by default. However, if your system demands more than 5 redirects, it may result in JMeter exceeded maximum number of redirects error. In this post, we have listed down steps to overcome this error. Actual error in JMeter: Response code: “Non HTTP response code: java.io.IOException” Response message: “Non HTTP response message: Exceeded maximum number of redirects: 5” This error is noticed because  JMeter  allows maximum 5 redirects by default and your system may be using more than 5 redirects. You need to increase this count to more than 5 in jmeter.properties file. Follow below steps to achieve this. Navigate to /bin directory of your JMeter installation. Locate jmeter.properties file and open it in any editor. Search for “httpsampler.max_redirects” property in opened file. Uncomment the above property by removing # before it. Change to value to more than 5 Eg. 20. Save the file and restart JMet...
Post a Comment
Read more

SSO with SAML login scenario in JMeter

SAML(Security Assertion Markup Language) is increasingly being used to perform single sign-on(SSO) operations. As WikiPedia puts it, SAML is an XML-based open standard data format for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties, in particular, between an identity provider and a service provider. With the rise in use of SAML in web applications, we may need to handle this in JMeter. This step-by-step tutorial shows SAML JMeter scenario to perform login operation. First request from JMeter is a GET request to fetch Login page. We need to fetch two values ‘SAMLRequest’ and ‘RelayState’ from the Login page response data. We can do this by using  Regular Expression Extractor . These two values need to be sent in POST request to service provider. Refer below image to see how to do this. We will get an HTML login page as a response to the request sent in 1st step. We need to fetch values of some hidden elements to pass it in the next request. We...
Post a Comment
Read more