🔥 Just launched: Unlimited Membership 🔥

Snapshots Through Time - How We Evolved Screenshot Testing at Our Company

14th December 2023

Locked

Alyssa Burlton

Head of Engineering Effectiveness

Snapshots Through Time - How We Evolved Screenshot Testing at Our Company image

Like Bookmark

Talk Description

As our app grew, we found it necessary to refactor our components as new requirements emerged. But how could we do this without breaking some styling by mistake? You can't write tests for CSS... can you?

A screenshot test is one that takes pictures of your pages and compares them to how they looked before. Done right, they can be a great way to increase confidence when making these types of changes.

This talk will take you through our journey with this type of testing, which started back in 2020. I'll share all the lessons we learned along the way, including how to make these tests run faster and flake less.

What you’ll learn

By the end of this talk, you'll be able to:

The gaps that screenshot testing covers that other types of testing can't
The factors that can make these tests flakey or brittle, and how to mitigate or eliminate them
How to make life easy when the screenshots have to be updated for intentional changes

Alyssa Burlton

Head of Engineering Effectiveness

Alyssa is an Engineering Effectiveness Lead from Leeds in the UK, working at Glean. She has worked in development for 8 years, and over that time focused on writing easily deployable, testable software. An infrastructure as code fan, she writes repeatable architecture scripts and loves teaching others. Outside of work, she’s a Taskmaster fan, and has even has made it into the official #HomeTasking compilations! She also enjoys sailing, trampolining and a good ale.