Twist – First 3 minutes !

Why first 3 minutes? Because I make my opinion in the first 3 minutes and one wrong direction will just spoil the whole show. So what all you need to know about Twist in first 3 minutes. This post is totally from a tester’s point of view and my personal opinion. So I will talk about features which as a Tester I would want to know in first 3 minutes of using Twist:

• Creating My First Test Project

Launch Twist and then follow the navigation File –> New –> Twist Project. Enter some relevant project name, language is selected by default to “Java”. Click on “Advanced” and choose a driver. The moment you choose a driver (let’s assume I want to test a web application), you will be asked to choose a browser and provide a browser location.
Now once you are done with all these things, you are done with your Environment Set up and project formalities. What next?

• Write your test 

By default Twist gives you an empty scenario named as “NewScenario”. On top of the Scenario Editor you would see options like “Workflow”, “Rules Table” and formatting options like “Bold, Italic, Header”. Start with Workflow, click on it and it will create a blank workflow for you to start typing in your scenarios. On the upper right hand side of the scenario editor, you have “Record, Execute Manually and Execute” options.

Till the time you write down your scenario, there is no point in Recording. Twist enforces you to write down a set of workflow and then automate it. In my opinion writing down test cases helps me understand the flow much better and creates a mental picture of how would I go about automating (almost sequential events). Once you are done with laying down your workflow, you can go about recording it, by clicking on “Record” button. This is quite intuitive and needs no elaboration.

• Know your options

A testing tool is powerful because it empowers a tester to achieve lot of things with just a few clicks. Till this point of time, you know how to create a testing project, how to write scenarios, how to record them. Let’s take a step further to complete one cycle. On the Left pane of the Twist IDE, you would see a tree structure with the project you created and scenarios you added. Right Click on the project and it would open a bunch of options for you to utilize. You can select “Execute All Scenarios in View” and this will run all your scenarios.

Another important aspect of a testing tool is it’s reporting capability. Twist creates a HTML report for you with details like “Success Rate” and execution time. Right Click on the project and select “Properties”, in the Properties window select “Twist Properties” and select the checkbox “Generate Local Report”. By default for any new project created, reporting is off. You can browse and choose the location or by default it will publish in “reports” folder. How to open the reports folder? In the Twist IDE press “Control +3”, and type in “Package Explorer”. Select the one highlighted in red below.

Once you open the Package Explorer, you would see your current project listed in that. Expand the project and you will see a list of folders along with “reports” folder. Expand the Reports folder and your report would be located with in another folder stamped with Date & Time. Double click the index.html file and you will see your test execution reports.


I hope the above things will not take more than 3 minutes for a tester to explore and feel confident about the tool. There are lot more interesting features in Twist to enjoy and you would really love them while automating.  More about them in future posts.
Till then don’t just read the blog, download and try Twist.