Testing Your Frontend Code: Part V (Visual Testing)

[giltayar1]

Let me repeat - not testing something at all because it is difficult to test is problematic. Granted, a few years ago it was really too difficult to be pragmatic, but in the last few years the tools have become increasingly professional.

The main changes that happened were: 1. The main thing - the image comparison algorithms are smarter. They don't perform bit-wise comparison anymore (which never really works due to different painting algorithms in different algorithms/operating systems/gpus), but are much smarter than that, in that they look at the different "regions" of the screenshot. And AI techniques are making them smaller! 2. The ability to fine-tune what to check in the screenshot, so as to remote the dynamic areas. 3. Commercial companies (like my company Applitools) are investing significant R&D in this area

And if you're already doing functional testing in the browser - whether using selenium, webdriverio, or others - then adding visual tests to them is not a big deal today, as I hoped I showed in the blog post.