Visual Testing – Revolution for DevOps Continuous Testing

While I was enjoying my Mocha coffee and travelling to work this morning, the concept of Visual Testing with DevOps came in my mind.

I am working in Visual Testing for a while now and did a few pieces of research on the best used-cases and practices to implement this concept where the testers can get maximum benefit. One such benefit they can use visual testing to reduce writing their test cases.

Before we arrive at an answer for that, let’s see a little about how DevOps work. The basic principle of DevOps is to provide faster builds.

Faster Builds means the test cases as part of the Continuous Testing phase should execute automated tests faster and must be reliable.

During the Sprints, we tend to write more test cases from the UI perspective. Say, for example, element’s presence, value assertions etc. If we are using the same set of test data to validate the outputs for all iterations, it means we are just writing multiple tests to test the same output.

We now need to think about maintaining the code for all the assertions in that page. Code gets bigger and the maintenance on the long run becomes complicated.

That’s where the concept of visual testing will be revolutionary. Assertions can be made in no mins and not writing single LOC ( Line Of Code).

The visual testing with the comparing technology can easily identify between the expected screen and the actual screen without writing any automation code.

One tool that runs the show is Applitools in the Visual Testing Era. With its AI capabilities, it does help testers to reduce writing the number of tests and can help them in focussing on other priority things.

Integrating Visual Testing is brilliantly faster when compared to traditional automation. The scans are quick and the time we spend in the pipeline eventually reduce.

Note: Visual testing can help in reducing the test counts, but not the test scope.