Table of contents
Roadmap
We created Headless Recorder (formerly know as Headless Recorder) as a cool Sunday afternoon side project while working on Checkly. The project is now at 20k+ users and 10K GitHub stars! Things were a little quiet around the project, but that’s going to change.
Checkly is growing and we want to double down on making Headless Recorder the most awesome 100% open source E2E test recorder on the planet. To be 100% transparent, we want to do this because:
- It is good for unsucking E2E test creation in general.
- It is therefore good for Checkly users.
Survey results
We ran a survey among Headless Recorder users the last months. We got ~400 responses. Here are the annotated results.
1. What are you using Headless Recorder for now?
| count | % respondents | % answers | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | Recording scripts for E2E testing | 256 | 64.3% | 37.4% |
| B | Recording scripts for scraping data | 161 | 40.5% | 23.5% |
| C | Recording scripts for monitoring | 98 | 24.6% | 14.3% |
| D | Recording scrips for one-off automation | 157 | 39.4% | 23% |
| E | Other (please specify) | 12 | 3% | 1.8% |
684 answers from 398 respondents.
2. If you could add one feature to Headless Recorder, what would it be?
| count | % | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Automatic cookie and authentication handling | 125 | 31.4% |
| B | Taking screenshots | 40 | 10.1% |
| C | Better click / mouse & hover handling | 113 | 28.4% |
| D | Running & debugging of scripts directly in the browser | 93 | 23.4% |
| E | Other (please specify) | 27 | 6.8% |
398 respondents
3. Which other test & script automation tools do you use?
| count | % respondents | % answers | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | Cypress | 89 | 22.4% | 14.2% |
| B | Selenium / Webdriver | 183 | 46% | 29.2% |
| C | Nightwatch | 29 | 7.3% | 4.6% |
| D | Jest | 166 | 41.7% | 26.5% |
| E | Mocha | 81 | 20.4% | 12.9% |
| F | Cucumber | 39 | 9.8% | 6.2% |
| G | Other (please specify) | 40 | 10.1% | 6.4% |
627 answers from 398 respondents
4. What do you expect from a Pro version of Headless Recorder?
This is an open ended question. Here is a curated overview of replies:
- better / smarter selector logic
- extract data from elements and create assertions
- video recordings
- better code output
- play the recorded script directly
- touch events
- mouse tracking
- hover tracking
- better handling of iframes, tabs and new windows
5. How would you score the current version of Headless Recorder?
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 84 / 21,1% ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 148 / 37,2% ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 136 / 34,2% ⭐️⭐️ 23 / 5,8% ⭐️ 7 / 1,8%
Roadmap (work in progress)
Based on our own findings at Checkly and the survey results, we are going to start working on a new version of Headless Recorder. As always, we cannot give any hard promises on dates or features, but this is an initial sketch of what we want to achieve.
- Support Puppeteer & Playwright.
- Support Jest and Mocha test creation with assertions.
- Record and playback in the browser.
- In-screen helpers for targeting the right selectors.
- Handling of authentication scenarios.
- Export to file or 3rd party service.