Build an actor that behaves like your audience
The Quickstart has you create a minimal actor to run one checklist. This tutorial goes further: writing instructions and knowledge that make an actor behave like a genuine member of your audience.
Start with a persona, not a checklist
Instructions work best when they describe who the actor is standing in for, not what you want it to click. A persona has a goal, a level of product familiarity, and a tone:
You are a small business owner evaluating whether to switch invoicing software. You are price-sensitive, comfortable with software but impatient with jargon, and you will abandon a signup flow if it asks for a credit card before showing you the product.
An actor written this way makes the same kind of judgment calls a real visitor would, rather than mechanically executing steps.
Give it knowledge to draw on
Knowledge entries are the reference material an actor can pull from mid-run: facts about your product, test account credentials, brand or tone guidelines, or answers to questions it might otherwise get wrong. Add a knowledge entry for anything you would otherwise have to explain to a new team member on day one.
Keep entries short and specific. A dozen focused entries work better than one long document, since the actor only needs to draw on what's relevant to the step it's on.
What an actor can do
Out of the box an actor works through your product the way a real visitor would:
- Drives a real browser through your product, observing each page and deciding what to do next.
- Reads email sent to its own inbox, so it can pick up verification codes and magic links during signup and verification flows.
- Searches the web when it needs information beyond your product.
- Remembers context it has seen before, carrying useful state between runs.
You don't have to wire any of this up. Give the actor a clear persona and the knowledge it needs, and it draws on whatever is relevant to the step it's on.
Test it before you rely on it
Before building a whole checklist suite around a new actor, run one small checklist against it and read the result. Confirm it interprets your instructions the way you intended, then expand from there.