Screen recording — the most powerful reporting tool for front-end developers
If it feels tiresome to write daily updates, you are exhausted from explaining how something works or someone asked you what you have implemented so far, you are at the right place! I am presenting my preferred method of giving reports about progress, it is easy as pie and very efficient, its name is: screen recording!
“One minute video is worth 1.8 million words.”
— McQuivey’s Forrester study
Why do I prefer to use screen recording as a reporting tool? The main reason for that is that a one minute video is worth 1.8 million words. What did you say? Is a video worth 1.8 million words or are those some random numbers? Let me copy-paste this:
1. 1 picture = 1,000 words
2. Video shoots at 30 frames per second
3. Therefore, 1 second of video = 30,000 words
4. 30,000 words x 60 seconds = 1.8 million.
5. Ta-da
“Salut! It’s time for our standup meeting. What will you do today?” for sure you don’t want to receive this message every day from your Slack bot. I’m crying inside while I’m replying to this message because I know that no one will pay attention. This is not a replacement for your daily updates but still, you need to know that daily reports won’t get read in most cases.
Screen recording is something like an MVP (a minimum viable product) for a functionality or a bug that you are currently working on. You don’t need to complete an entire functionality to present your work. You can always finish a meaningful chunk of work and do a quick presentation of it. This approach has a lot of benefits, for example: If a designer or product owner changes their mind and suddenly they go with the well-known phrase “can you change only this small part”. You will probably feel dead inside (like I used to) if you have already implemented that entire functionality before presenting it. We build startups, so we need to be agile.
Feedback is the key. First from the product owner, designer and your colleagues before you get feedback from users. If you are working in the same office as the developers, a good option is to ask them for their opinions. Presenting without screen recording is a good option when you work with only one developer. The situation can get more complicated if you need to present your work to multiple colleagues, always explaining the same thing over and over again. It gets even more complicated if you are working in a company which offers a remote work option and you need to spend a few minutes to describe your work on your team chat. There is a way to avoid all of this.
Imagine that you could record your implementation. What If I told you that you can do that? Everyone prefers to watch a video than reading long daily reports containing your explanation. The long text often requires full attention to understand the essence. With every video you can easily give an update on your progress and the team will be aware of it, even these guys which are not particularly interested in your daily progress could watch your video demos.
A tool that I use on daily basis for screen recording is Loom. Capture your screen, record your front-facing camera, and narrate it all at once, then instantly share with a simple link, or you can download that video. They have cool features: web camera recording, audio recording, comments, download option, analytics, password protector and cut option. File size for screen recording one minute video is about 2 megabytes, and that is really impressive.
PS: If you are a developer and you are required to write your daily reports for the previous day, I would like to recommend a little tool called git-standup. Simply run it in your project directory and it will give you the output from the last working day.
Thanks for reading!
