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Track Talk T5

The Visual Testing Revolution

Andrew Knight

11:00-11:45 CEST Tuesday 18th October

Assertions for traditional functional testing for web apps can be complicated and fragile. Think about all the things on a page that should be checked. Pages can have dozens of elements, and testers frequently make tradeoffs between things to check and time spent automating the selectors and assertion conditions. Visual testing simplifies that by eliminating all those assertions with single-line snapshot calls. Plus, those snapshot comparisons capture all meaningful things on the page. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a snapshot is worth a thousand assertions. This greatly simplifies test automation effort while providing greater protection.

Testing is interaction plus verification. That’s it – you do something, and you make sure it works. You can perform those two parts manually or with automation. An automated test script still requires manual effort, though: someone needs to write code for those interactions and verifications. For web apps, verifications can be lengthy. Pages can have hundreds of elements, and teams constantly take risks when choosing which verifications to perform and which to ignore. Traditional assertions are also inadequate for testing visuals, like layout and colors. That’s lots of work for questionable protection.

There’s a better way: automated visual testing. Instead of writing several assertions explicitly, we can take visual snapshots of our pages and compare them over time to detect changes. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a snapshot is worth a thousand assertions. In this talk, I’ll show you how to do this type of visual testing with Applitools. We’ll automate a basic web UI test together using traditional techniques with Selenium WebDriver and Java, and then we’ll supercharge it with visual snapshots. We’ll see how Visual AI can pinpoint meaningful differences instead of insignificant noise. We’ll also see how to render those snapshots on any browser configuration we want to test, without needing to re-run our tests in full. By the end of this talk, you’ll see how automated visual testing will revolutionize functional test automation!

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Session Speaker

Andrew Knight

Developer Advocate - Applitools, USA

Andrew Knight, also known as “Pandy,” is the Automation Panda. He’s a software testing and automation champion who loves to help people build better quality software. In the past, he’s built large-scale test automation projects that run continuously and reliably. Currently, Pandy is a Developer Advocate at Applitools, where he helps folks do the best visual testing they can. He is also Director of Test Automation University, which offers a multitude of free courses on software testing from the world’s leading instructors. On the side, Pandy is writing a book on software testing, and he also leads development for Boa Constrictor, the .NET Screenplay Pattern. Check out his tech blog at AutomationPanda.com, and follow him on Twitter at @AutomationPanda.

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