How to remove unwanted actions from the recording in Manual Test Runner/MTM?

If you were recording your application while doing manual testing inside MTM, you must have come across a scenario where you wanted to clean up your recording by deleting a few unnecessary actions that were recorded inadvertently. In the example below, I illustrate a case where I opened msn.com and searched for a string – an extra mouse hover has been recorded over the search text box.

Now, there are 2 options:

1. Don’t edit the recording – since the tool is smart enough to ignore failed hovers during playback and won’t interfere with your test playing back.

2. Edit the recording and delete the extra action – this is useful in cases where the extra action(s) are to dismiss one-time dialogs like the “Do you want to remember passwords” dialog for IE that can be suppressed for future times. Now, if you encounter that dialog during record, but are sure you won’t hit it during playback, you can delete this action from your recording.

Just expand the section at the bottom of MTR to reveal the list of actions being recorded. Select the action to delete and right click –> delete action. There you go – your recording will now be devoid of the extra action.

- Anu

Cross posted from Musings of a tester testing test tools