In the competitive world of application development, ensuring overall quality and reliability has become increasingly important. Though traditional testing methods have had their share of merits for a long time, the increasing complexity of present-day applications has definitely raised the need for newer strategies to handle such challenges. One of such strategies is visual testing, which is gaining more relevance than other options. The more complex and user-experience-oriented applications become, the more automated visual testing becomes a central constituent of the overall testing strategy. This blog focuses on visual test automation and explains reasons why it has become so critical. Moreover, you will see how it solves complex problems in the application development lifecycle.
What Do We Mean by Visual Testing?
Visual testing is a reliable technique that evaluates the appearance of the application’s UI on different devices, browsers, and screen sizes. This method detects all the inconsistencies, bugs, design deviations, and layout problems that can have an adverse effect on the user experience.
Visual testing involves taking screenshots of the app’s interface and then doing a comparison with the expected images. Detected discrepancies are highlighted for review, enabling teams to resolve them in the early stages of application development.
The Increasing Complexity of Applications
Modern applications are more complex than ever, with intricate UIs, responsive designs, and a multitude of device and browser combinations to consider. The rise of this complexity has introduced new challenges:
- Diverse User Environments: Applications need to function seamlessly across a wide range of devices, screen sizes, and operating systems. Ensuring that there is a visual consistency across various environments can be a challenging process.
- Frequent Updates: With agile development practices and continuous deployment, applications are updated frequently. Each update has the potential to introduce visual downgrades. To stop visual regression, it is imperative to verify that the updates do not adversely affect the UI in any way.
- Design-based Development: Prioritizing on design aspects and user experience (UX) means that visual attributes play a vital role in the overall success of the application. It is important to remember that even slight irregularities can exponentially affect user engagement and satisfaction.
Key Benefits of Visual Testing
Automated visual testing offers several advantages that make it a valuable addition to the testing toolkit:
1. Enhanced User Experience
Users interact with the machine and essentially the software through an interface called the User Interface (UI). The goal of UI is to make sure that there is an effective operation and control of the application from the user-end. However, the presence of visual irregularities like overlapping text, misaligned elements, inconsistent colors, incorrect fonts can significantly decrease the user experience. Visual testing allows developers to ensure that all aspects of UI meet design specifications. It is a crucial method that ultimately makes sure that users get a pleasant and consistent experience across diverse screens and devices.
2. Early Detection of Visual Issues
Traditional testing methods often focus on functional aspects and may overlook visual details. Visual test automation helps catch visual issues early in the development process, before they reach end-users. It helps in recognizing deviations between the expected app presentation and the actual presentation. It also allows teams to address these deviations promptly and reduce possibilities of expensive resolutions later on or negative user experience.
3. Efficiency and Automation
Manual visual testing can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially when dealing with complex UIs and multiple device configurations. Visual testing tools, on the other hand, automate the steps of screenshot capturing and comparison. Thus, the manual effort and time essential for visual verification gets significantly reduced. Since the process is automated, the risk of human errors is extremely less. You can increase the overall accuracy and consistency of the testing process.
4. Cross-Device and Cross-Browser Validation
With the proliferation of devices and browsers, ensuring visual consistency across different platforms is a major challenge. Visual testing tools can automate the process of verifying the UI on various devices and browsers, helping teams ensure that the application appears accurately in all target environments. Validating the compatibility of the applications across platforms is extremely crucial for ensuring best user experience.
5. Design Validation
As applications increasingly focus on design and user experience, validating that the design is implemented accurately becomes critical. Visual testing helps ensure that design elements, such as fonts, colors, and layout, are accurately represented in the application. This validation helps maintain design integrity and adherence to brand guidelines.
Visual Testing Tools and Technologies
Several automated visual testing tools and technologies are available to assist teams in implementing visual testing effectively:
- Selenium and Visual Testing Integrations: Selenium, a popular test automation tool, can be integrated with visual testing tools to combine functional and visual testing. Ensuring this integration proves to be a comprehensive solution. It ensures automation of both functional and visual tests.
- Applitools Eyes: Applitools Eyes is a widely trusted visual testing platform that leverages AI-driven visual comparison to detect visual errors. It provides support to a wide range of platforms, browsers, and devices, which makes it a complete tool for visual testing.
- Percy: Percy is another visual testing tool that provides snapshot-based visual regression testing. It integrates with CI/CD pipelines to automate visual checks and validate visual changes before deployment.
- BackstopJS: BackstopJS automates visual regression testing by rendering and capturing screenshots of your UI with Headless Chromium, and it also allows developers to simulate interactions in their tests with Puppeteer.
Best Practices for Implementing Visual Testing
To maximize the benefits of visual test automation, consider the following best practices:
1. Define Clear Visual Criteria
Establish clear visual criteria and guidelines to define what constitutes acceptable visual quality. Criteria must include details like layout requirements, color schemes, and design standards. Clear guidelines for visual appearance aid in ensuring total consistency in visual testing. Thus, it streamlines the process of identifying errors or deviations.
2. Integrate with CI/CD Pipelines
Integrate visual testing tools with your CI/CD pipelines to automate visual checks as part of the development workflow. This integration is vital for identifying and addressing issues early on. With this, you can mitigate the risk of deploying error-rich software updates.
3. Use Baselines Effectively
Maintain baseline images representing the expected visual appearance of the application. Regularly update baselines to reflect changes in design or UI elements. To detect visual regressions and inconsistencies, you need to have a baseline which is accurate and trustworthy.
4. Review and Prioritize Visual Issues
Not all visual discrepancies are equally critical. Instead of fixing all the issues simultaneously, you can choose to prioritize. After detection, review all visual deviations and prioritize them depending on their impact on functionality and user experience. The focus must be on high-priority variations that negatively affect the design integrity and usability.
5. Collaborate with Design and Development Teams
Foster collaboration between design, development, and testing teams to ensure that visual requirements are well-understood and implemented. A collaborative environment ensures consistent communication. It aids in aligning design and development goals with visual expectations as well as testing efforts.
Conclusion
Visual test automation is now essential to the quality assurance process as applications become more complex and design-focused. It is a vital process that ensures that the user interface is aligned with the design specifications. It also makes sure that visual standards and user satisfaction are maintained across multiple devices and browsers. With visual testing tools, developers get automation and efficiency. They can also overcome the challenges that conventional testing methods pose. Thus, it has emerged as a significant strategy for sophisticated application development. It empowers teams to deliver high-quality apps that can create a lasting impact in a competitive market and meet user’s expectations comprehensively.
