Visual Automation Testing

Talk Description

There is an increase in web apps that are accessed on various browsers and viewports and are expected to work on every single one of them and look exactly the same.

From a quality engineer's perspective, it only increases the combination of browsers on desktop and real devices one needs to assert the functionality and how it looks with the various states of the page too. The manual effort to do this cannot scale, hence I will share how one can use visual automation testing to overcome the manual effort.

In this talk, I will share what is visual testing, automated visual testing and its principle. When and why one should create automated visual testing. The types of visual testing and how different they are based on test levels they are run on and their advantages.

The talk also covers an overview of a few popular visual testing tools ( pixel-based vs non-pixel-based tools)  and what criteria to use when picking the right tool for the project you're working on. Highlighting how one can use existing acceptance test/e2e framework to piggyback on to bootstrap visual testing. I will also share how one can use visual testing to assert the states of the page while also performing functional testing.

The key to visual testing is how one stores the baseline image and has the ability to replace them at ease. I will share how git lfs has been very useful for this. Good, visual test run reports are equally important to have for visually testing frameworks to scale and to be embraced by teams. I will share an open source tool that can help generate actual, expected and diff images reports with ease and make it easier for any team members to understand the result of test run at ease and also replace expected images with actual images while storing these images on git lfs instead of the traditional git repo.

I will also provide an overview of the challenges of using pixel-based image comparison tools, running tests locally vs running on the cloud, dynamic data/content, learnings and best practices of visual testing I have learnt over years working on CasperJS, PhantomJS, Applitools and many more visual testing tools.

What you’ll learn

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