Several weeks ago, we sat down with Thai Pangsakulyanont, who was one of the Applitools Visual AI Rockstar Hackathon winners, about his experiences in the Hackathon and what he took away from the experience.
Thai Pangsakulyanont is a front-end architect working for Taskworld in Bangkok, Thailand. He has eight years of testing experience, including six with Selenium.
Starting Point
At Taskworld, Thai said, they make and sell a productivity/project management web application.
The stack is mostly JavaScript. For their end-to-end testing, they use their own test runner, called Prescript. They use prescript in conjunction with Selenium and “expect” assertions.
Thai said he has six years of experience with Selenium, using both Javascript and Ruby. He had no prior experience with Applitools, but he did have prior experience with other image diffing programs. For instance, he was using Javascript image processing for comparing images as an experiment and part of his side project.
Applitools Pre-Hackathon Expectations and Experience
Having used percy.io previously Thai expected something like a visual diff tool. He knows he can use percy for visual diffs and visual regression testing.
What he didn’t expect in Applitools were the internal tools for communication inside the Applitools UI to help communicate his findings to teammates. He really liked the productivity aspects of Applitools.
He had a little bit of trouble getting started with branching. Thai had prior experience with gitbranch, and he expected Applitools to behave similarly. It took him a while to get the behaivor the way he expected, but he figured it out.
Thai realized how easy he found it to run visual regression testing with Applitools Visual AI.
Working on the Hackathon, Thai realized the number of test cases that he could not cover with traditional assertions. For example, an icon disappearing can still show up in the DOM, even if it disappears for the user. He generally wouldn’t write a test to see if a button had moved, and that kind of test comes for free when using Visual AI
Thai realized the number of cases that Visual AI could cover that his traditional assertion-based testing would miss.
Ideas For Improvement
Thai’s big takeaways come from his perspective as an architect by day and running his own development projects in non-work hours. Thai likes to experiment, which explains how an architect got involved in a Visual AI hackathon. He liked the idea of learning something new.
While Thai figured out the Github integration, he’d love it to be easier (something we continue to improve). He loved a lot of the other collaboration capabilities inside Applitools.
Thai works constantly to improve his productivity. As a contributor to open-source projects, Thai likes working with open-source tools. He has worked on several projects. As a coder, he discovered that the more code he wrote in a project the more likely he would write bugs. He picked up testing skills to help catch bugs in his own code.
To help improve open-source projects, Thai said he could see the use of an open-source version of Applitools as a testing solution. He would love to have an open-source solution that would allow him to share with other developers in an open-source dashboard that didn’t require a login. Such a dashboard would give coding teams visibility into bug impact from different code additions.
Takeaways
Overall, Thai enjoyed his experience working on the Hackathon.
Thai Pangsakulyanont won a Platinum award for his experience in the Applitools hackathon.
For More Information
- Five Data-Driven Reasons To Add Visual AI To Your End-To-End Tests
- Upskill and Create New Tests Much Faster – The Impact of Visual AI
- Automated Visual Testing Best Practices
- Sign up for a free Applitools account.
- Request an Applitools demo
