Just a few hours ago Cypress officially debuted their biggest release ever. Cypress version 10 has some powerful new features, headlined by new component testing functionality and a completely redesigned UI. There’s a lot to unpack, so let’s take a look together.

Component Testing

While component testing was present in previous versions of Cypress as an experimental feature, with Cypress 10 it is getting much more of a spotlight. This will make a lot of developers happy. Being able to render components in a real browser, debug them using Chrome DevTools and access different states is a real game changer.

With this feature Cypress is entering into a competition with tools like Jest or Storybook, which are very popular with developers.

The best part about this is that instead of testing your components with the terminal (where you can’t really see them) you are testing your components inside a browser. You can interact with them too, which adds up to an amazing developer experience.

The main difference between end-to-end testing and component testing is that instead of using cy.visit() to open your application, you use cy.mount() to render out your React, Vue, Angular or other component and test it in isolation.

If you are just getting started with component testing, Cypress has got you covered. They have included a really nice setup wizard to help you setup your project for component testing. This will help you install the dependencies you’ll need and set up your cypres.config.js configuration file for you.

Project Structure

With previous versions, you might have been used to seeing these items in every Cypress project:

This is no longer the case for Cypress 10. Your configuration will now be stored in cypress.config.js instead of the cypress.json file. This is a pretty familiar pattern used with different web development tools.

Your plugins/index.js file is now part of this file as well. With this function you can tap into different node events that happen during a Cypress test run (like auto-opening dev tools when browser opens, or dynamically resolving configuration) or trigger node scripts right from your test.

Naming Conventions

With component testing brought into the game, developers and testers need to distinguish between different types of tests and be able to keep the whole project clean and easy to navigate. That’s why Cypress now recommends naming your end-to-end tests as test.cy.js and your component tests as test.spec.js. This is of course just a recommendation, and you can specify any pattern using specPattern option in the cypress.config.js file.

Besides this naming convention, the oddly named integration folder where the test files are will now become the e2e folder. support/index.js will now become support/e2e.js. Of course, all of these can be configured in the cypress.config.js file and there’s no need to follow these conventions if your project uses another.

Migration Assistant

Feeling overwhelmed by all the changes? No need to be! The Cypress team has prepared a migration assistant that will make sure the transition of your project is seamless. In three easy steps you can change the names and folder of your e2e tests:

rename the support/index.js file:

and most importantly, migrate your cypress.json to a cypress.config.js file.

Deprecations

With the new version, Cypress users will say goodbye to some of the features that were not widely used. Most notably, Cypress’ test recorder called Cypress Studio will no longer be present in v10. This was communicated in a recent blogpost in Cypress which communicates some of the reasoning behind the decision. There’s also an open discussion for those who might miss this feature. 

If you still need a record and replay tool for your Cypress testing, you can use the brand new functionality of DevTools Recorder. Since v100 it can generate Cypress code that you can import in your tests. We took a look at this with Mike Cataldo in our recent podcast. For more about it you can also check out this post to learn how to get started with the DevTools Recorder, or this webinar on automating tests using DevTools Recorder with Google’s Jecelyn Yeen.

Cypress is also pushing towards using cy.session(), which is a great command for caching your browser state and avoiding having to log in before every test. This solution will soon become the preferred way of handling cookies, local storage and session storage, making APIs like Cypress.Cookies() obsolete. This deprecation was in fact announced in version 9.7.0. The good news is that using cy.session() pairs greatly with Cypress’ recently released 3rd party domain support. To avoid doing 3rd party login multiple times, you can cache it with cy.session() and limit the number of login actions that could otherwise cause rate-limiting.

Going Forward

Cypress 10 was a version long in the making. While there are many changes that might feel like just visual changes there’s more to this update than meets the eye. The Cypress team has also made many changes “under the hood” which prepare ground for some long awaited features such as native iframe support, or WebKit support. While working with iframes is possible now, it requires some workarounds and does not provide the same debugging features as rest you’ll get for the rest of your site. With WebKit support, you’ll be able to test against a Safari-like browser, which is widely used, especially with Apple users. Since Cypress is open source, you can check out the progress on these features on their roadmap, where you can find links to the open issues.

Learn More and Get Started with Cypress 10

If you are interested in exploring what’s new with the latest versions of Cypress, join me live on YouTube, where Mike Cataldo and I will discuss the updates and explore what’s new in Cypress 10 together. We start the stream on June 1st, but you can check out the recording after the stream ends as well.

You can download the latest version of Cypress directly from their website or by running npm install cypress in your terminal, starting today. Of course, if you’re using Applitools for visual testing, it’s compatible with all versions of Cypress, including v10. Learn more about how to get started with Cypress and Applitools, or if you’re new to Applitools you can sign up for a free account today.

The post What’s New in Cypress 10 appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

EMA (Enterprise Management Associates) recently released a report titled “Disrupting the Economics of Software Testing Through AI.” In this report, author Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director at EMA, discusses the reasons why traditional approaches to software quality cannot scale to meet the needs of modern software delivery. He highlights 5 key categories of AI and 6 critical pain points of test automation that AI addresses. 

We sat down with Torsten to talk about the report and hear his insights on how AI is impacting Software Testing:

1. What’s wrong with the current state of testing? 
   
   Many software development teams are struggling to deliver on the promise of Agile/DevOps and are faced with numerous technical challenges, such as rising application complexity and explosion of browsers/devices. Multiply this by the constant drive for faster releases to deliver increased customer value – without the ability to hire additional quality control staff – and you can quickly see why the traditional approach to software testing can no longer scale to keep up. We need to optimize the process with AI to eliminate the mundane and repetitive tasks and ultimately ensure business success.

2. How does AI help with software testing?
   
   There are five key capabilities AI provides to help improve human efficiency: smart test creation, self healing, coverage detection, anomaly detection, and visual inspection. In the report, I discuss the six critical pain points where these capabilities are delivering ROI today: false positives, test maintenance, inefficient feedback loops, rising application complexity, device sprawl, and tool chain complexity.
   
   

   The 5 Key AI Capabilities

   Of the capabilities available, AI-driven visual inspection has the broadest reach and highest impact. This discipline aims to provide test engineers with an additional “pair of eyes,” leaving the engineer to focus on activities that really need human intelligence. It provides humans with the contextual information needed to accelerate their test and remediation efforts, recommending solutions wherever necessary and remembering human decisions.

3. You talk about visual inspection having the highest impact. What pain points does it address?
   
   Traditional pixel-based comparison attempts to perform visual inspection but is plagued with false positives. Training deep learning models to inspect an application through the eyes of the end-user removes a lot of the mundane repetitive tasks that cause humans to be inefficient. Due to its accuracy, AI-driven visual inspection can enable teams to create a stable suite of automated tests with reduced false positives. Visual inspection can be further leveraged to drive cross-browser/cross-device validation at scale.

4. How are people adopting AI? Do I need to hire AI experts or develop an AI practice? 
   
   The world’s top brands are already adopting AI to transform their software testing, but they’re focusing on the ROI gained from the speed and scalability of leveraging AI in the development process – not developing the AI itself. There are solutions on the market today that give you the ability to take advantage of fully trained models and several can be layered on top of your existing test automation. One of the solutions that seems widely adopted for visual inspection is Applitools, which is already trained on +1B images and delivers extremely high levels of accuracy.

5. How does the role of the developer / tester change with the introduction of AI?
   
   Developers and testers still need to make a decision about what and how something should be automated. AI minimizes the mundane and repetitive tasks, freeing the engineers to do more creative, interesting and valuable work.
   
   For example, what happens when a tester is reviewing thousands of webpages for accuracy? Some pages have differences, but they don’t matter. AI can filter those out and highlight only the subset that needs review.
   
   Auto-classification, grouping issues together, is another great example of being able to reduce your work and improve accuracy. If I’m looking at what looks like the same problem over and over again, I might miss a defect. Whereas if the AI categorizes and groups similar issues together it greatly reduces the possibility of a missed defect.

6. What’s the future state for software testing, and where do we start?
   
   Autonomous testing is the vision for the future, but we have to ask ourselves, why don’t we have an autonomous car yet? It’s because today, we’re still chaining together models, and models of models. We’re striving to get to the point where AI is taking care of all of the tactical and repetitive decisions and humans are thinking more strategically at the end of the process, where they are more valuable from a business-focused perspective. I would recommend starting with the mature solutions available today in the areas of visual inspection and self healing – keeping an eye on the future and ongoing evolution of AI. 

Thanks to Torsten for spending the time with us. If you would like to start implementing AI as part of your testing pipeline, sign up for a free Applitools account and start enjoying the benefits of Visual AI in minutes.

This article was originally published on SD Times.

The post Disrupting the Economics of Software Testing Through AI: An Interview with Torsten Volk appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

Learn why unit testing isn’t only for developers, the importance of unit testing to software testers and quality engineers, and how you can improve your skills by building better unit tests.

The responsibility for product quality frequently falls on software testers. Yet, software testers are often divorced or even excluded from conversations around the cheapest and easiest way to inject quality into the product and the entire software development lifecycle, right from the beginning: unit testing. In this article, we’ll explore why it’s important for software testers to be able to speak clearly about unit tests and how this can help deliver better quality.

Why Unit Tests Are Important

Unit tests form the solid base of the testing pyramid. They are the cheapest kinds of tests to run, and can be run frequently throughout the deployment pipeline. Unit tests allow us to find errors the soonest, and to fix them before they bubble up in other, more expensive kinds of testing like functional or UI tests, which take much longer to complete and run than unit tests.

Unit Testing Frameworks

Most developers know how to write unit tests in the language in which they develop, and most languages have several libraries to choose from, depending on the type and complexity of testing. For example, Python has pytest, pyunit, unittest(inspired by Java’s JUnit), Nose2, and hypothesis (for property tests, a non-example based type of unit test). These are just some of the choices available, and every language has a number of possible unit testing frameworks to choose from.

You don’t need to know everything about a unit testing library, or even how to write unit tests, to get value from understanding the basics of the unit testing framework. A lot of value can be gained from knowing what framework is being used, and what kinds of assertions can be made within the framework. Also, does the framework support table tests or property-style tests? Understanding what is supported can help you better understand what aspects of your test design might be best handled in the unit-testing phase. 

Unit Testing Is the Developers Job

Yes, developers typically write unit tests. However, they are largely responsible for writing these tests to ensure that the code works – most developer tests are likely to cover happy-path and obvious negative cases. They may not think to write tests for edge or corner cases, as they are working to meet deadlines for code delivery. This is where software testers with unit test knowledge can help to make the unit tests more robust, and perhaps decrease testing that might otherwise be done at integration or functional levels.

The first step, if you are unfamiliar with the code, is to request a walkthrough of the unit tests. Understanding what developers have done and what they are testing will help you to make recommendations about what other tests might be included. Remember, adding tests here is the cheapest and fastest place to do it, especially if there are tests you want run quickly on every code change that a developer makes. 

If you are familiar with the codebase and version control systems, then you can also look for the unit tests in the code. These are often stored in a test directory, and typically named so it is easy to identify what is being tested. Quality teams can be coached to review unit tests, and compare those with their test plans. Once coached, teams can make recommendations to developers to improve unit tests and make test suites more robust. Some team members may even expand their skills by adding tests and making pull requests/merge requests for unit tests. There are many ways to participate in making unit tests more effective, involving writing no code or writing a lot of code; it’s up to you to decide what most benefits you and your team. 

But What if There Are No Unit Tests?

If you are responsible for software quality and you discover that your team or company is not doing unit testing, this can be both painful, but also a great opportunity for growth. The first step in having the conversations around developing unit tests can revolve around the efficiency, efficacy, and speed of unit tests. The next step is building awareness and fluency about quality and testing as a part of development, which is a difficult task to tackle alone, and it may not work without buy-in from key people. However, if you can get understanding and buy-in on the importance of building testing and testability into the product starting with unit-tests as the foundation, further discussions about code quality can be opened up.

Better Quality is the Goal

At the end of every day, every member of the team should be responsible for quality. However, that responsibility rests with different people in different organizations, and often with the person who has the word “quality” in their title is the person who is ultimately held responsible in the end. If you are responsible for quality, understanding the basics of how unit tests work in your code base will help you to have better discussions with developers about how to improve software quality in the fastest, cheapest way possible – directly from the code.

The post Why Should Software Testers Understand Unit Testing? appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

Here at Applitools, we are relentlessly focused on making software testing easier, faster and more reliable. Our industry-leading Visual AI, trained on more than a billion images to deliver 99.9999% accuracy, can automatically detect visual and functional bugs just as a human would. The blazing fast Ultrafast Test Cloud, powered by our Ultrafast Grid, makes cross-browser, cross-device and cross-platform testing a snap. And we’re not done there, as we continue to grow and innovate along the path to autonomous testing.

Don’t just take our word for it though.  Hundreds of clients have determined that Applitools is the best visual testing tool and are using Applitools today, including nine of the top 10 software companies in the world, seven of the top 10 banks in the US and two of the top three retailers. We’ve empirically measured the impact of Visual AI and we know that the results – 5.8x faster test creation, 5.9x more efficient code (in terms of lines of code), 3.8x improvement in test code stability and 45% increase in effectiveness catching bugs early – speak for themselves.

We know that Applitools can make a dramatic difference in the lives of our customers – but again, you don’t need to just hear this from us. Numerous organizations have recognized the value Applitools brings just this month.

Update 1/19/22: We’re excited to share that we have also just been named the Best Testing Service/Tool in the DevOps Dozen² Awards for 2021. We’re honored by this latest recognition as well as the ones below!

Applitools Awarded Leading Vendor in Testing for North America

Software Testing News recently named Applitools Leading Vendor. This award is granted only to the vendor who receives top marks for both their product/service and customer service. Software Testing News specifically looked for commitment to a high quality product with excellent customer satisfaction, strong value for its cost, rock-solid reliability and ease of use, and proof of thought leadership that can drive the software testing/QE industry forward. 

It’s not easy to score highly on each of those metrics, and we’re thrilled that Software Testing News has recognized us with this award as the as the leading software testing vendor.

Applitools Named Fastest-Growing Software Testing Vendor in North America

It’s one thing to be recognized for product innovation and customer service – and make no mistake, we are proud of that – but when the rubber meets the road it is only the businesses that are growing that can meet the increasingly complex needs of more customers over the long term. That’s why we’re so excited to be named the fastest-growing software testing vendor in North America by Deloitte. 

This placement on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 is a testament to the demand in the market for a solution that can make the demanding lives of test engineers easier and significantly increase the reliability of software.

Applitools a Leader on GetApp and Capterra

We’re always grateful to the testing community and our customers for their feedback, and we’re pleased that many of them are not shy about sharing their love for Applitools and how it helps make their lives easier and more productive. That’s why we’re a Category Leader in Automated Testing on GetApp and have a strong 4.6/5.0 rating on Capterra – with no reviewer giving us fewer than four stars.

Our commitment to our customers is ironclad. We know that it’s only by our continued dedication to giving our customers exactly what they need that we can continue to win awards for growth and innovation, and we’re honored that our customers choose to share their experiences with the world.

Try it for Yourself

See for yourself why everyone from our customers to market-defining publications are calling Applitools a leader in automated software testing and showcasing the tremendous impact we’re having on the software testing industry. Get your free account and dive in, or reach out to schedule your demo today.

The post Applitools Recognized as Testing Leader by DevOps.com, Deloitte, GetApp and More appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

Cypress 9.0.0

Last week, Cypress came out with their 3rd major release this year. Version 9.0.0 does not bring many radical changes, but as is usual with Cypress, it lays ground for upcoming features. But there are couple of breaking changes and new features that are worth talking about, so let’s dive into them.

Breaking Changes in Cy.Contains

This is one of my favourite commands in Cypress. It enables you to select elements using its text, which is just great for test readability. You can also filter what kind of element with a given text you want to search for.

Prior to Cypress v9, .contains() would target any element that is inside the <body> tag. In some frameworks, this would lead to situations where Cypress would select a <style> or <script> tag as well, if it would contain given text. Normally this would lead to unexpected results, so in version 9, any <script> or <style> tags are ignored by cy.contains() querying. If you still want to check content of these tags, you can do so using cy.get() command.

Custom Commands

Custom command are great. they are one of the best way to abstract your code in Cypress and expand your command library. They allow you to wrap existing commands and create command sequences, create custom logic or even autocomplete your selectors.

Since the existing command library is already pretty big, it is easy to create your own command and accidentally hit an existing command name. This can lead to confusing situations. Cypress team has added a guard, that will throw an error in case this happens.

No worries though, the existing Cypress.Commands.overwrite() API remains intact. You can still rewrite existing commands, or add functionality. How about improving the existing cy.log() command and add numbers to your logs? Check out my article!

File Encoding

With commands like cy.writeFile() and cy.readFile() you can write and read files from your filesystem. In addition to existing encodings, you can now write and read your files and fixtures as binary, using a null argument.

To read about different encodings, visit Cypress documentation.

Other New Updates in Cypress 9

There are also a couple of minor improvements that may help you with testing your application. Cypress has improved the way it handles sticky headers. With its latest update, it will try to make sure that an element is not covered by sticky header – a situation one might run into. in various cases.

document.referrer is now correctly taken from the application under test, instead of being added by Cypress. This is especially helpful for application that rely on this attribute in situations where a given app is embedded inside an iframe.

Cypress has also done minor improvements on TypeScript for custom commands. With v9, argument types are inferred from type definition, which prevents adding improper arguments or their accidental rewriting.

With its latest release, Cypress also drops support of 32-bit version of Windows as this is not widely used anymore.

Curious How Cypress Works with Applitools?

You can easily add automated visual testing to your Cypress tests using Applitools – it’s fully compatible with the latest version. Check out this blog post for an example or feel free to dive right into our tutorials.

Get Started Today

Want to try Applitools Eyes for yourself? You can get started today at the link below – the account is free forever.

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The post What’s New in Cypress 9 appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

We are proud to announce our position as the top ranked software testing vendor on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech companies in North America.

Here at Applitools we know that when people experience the power of Visual AI, they fall in love, and that there is a large and growing demand for this technology in the market. We’re proud to share our recognition as the fastest-growing software testing company on the continent as a part of the Deloitte Fast 500. This long-running list, now in its 27^th year, provides a ranking of the fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech companies — both public and private — in North America. Technology Fast 500 award winners are selected based on percentage fiscal year revenue growth from 2017 to 2020.

It is an honor to be the top ranked software testing vendor on the 2021 Deloitte Technology Fast 500. And, it is a testament to the growing demand for Visual AI technology. From healthcare to transportation, digital experiences are becoming central to companies’ success. Applitools makes delivering flawless digital experiences simple, ensuring brand integrity is never compromised. Thanks to all of the hard work and dedication from the Applitools team that made our ranking on the Technology Fast 500 possible.

Gil Sever, CEO and co-founder, Applitools

How Does Applitools Help?

Modern software development teams are rapidly delivering innovation to market through more frequent and shorter release cycles, but they struggle to fully test the customer experience due to increasing application complexity and an explosion of device/browser combinations.

Applitools is helping over 400 of the world’s top digital brands release, test, and monitor flawless mobile, web, and native apps in a fully automated way. Our Visual AI mimics the human eye and brain to avoid undetected functional and visual bugs, minimizing false positive bug alerts. The Ultrafast Test Cloud can instantly validate entire application pages and detect issues on even the most complex and dynamic pages. When development teams are confident they can fix functional and visual bugs faster, they can push more high-quality code faster than ever before.

Applitools’ Visual AI modernizes critical test automation use cases — functional and visual regression testing, web and mobile UI/UX testing, cross browser / cross device testing, localization testing, PDF testing, digital accessibility and legal/compliance testing — to transform the way businesses deliver innovation at the speed of DevOps without jeopardizing their brand.

An Honor to be Recognized

The Technology Fast 500 list is an impressive list of top companies in the tech space, and we’re honored to be recognized and proud of our placement as one of the fastest growing companies in North America.

Each year the Technology Fast 500 shines a light on leading innovators in technology and this year is no exception. In the face of innumerable challenges resulting from the pandemic, the best and brightest were able to pivot, reinvent and transform and grow. We celebrate the winning organizations and especially the talented employees driving their success.

Paul Silverglate, vice chair, Deloitte LLP and U.S. technology sector leader

“The pandemic has underscored the urgent need for tech solutions in a variety of areas across health care, fintech, energy tech, entertainment, to name a few, so reliance on innovators like the winners of the Technology Fast 500 is more important than ever,” said . “These companies are not only at the cutting edge, transforming the way we do business, but most importantly, recognize the strategic importance of ongoing innovation, especially in the ever-changing world of technology.” 

Christie Simons, partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP and industry leader for technology, media and telecommunications within Deloitte’s audit & assurance practice

Thank You

Many dedicated team members have worked long and hard here at Applitools to achieve this ranking, but it is also the direct result of the feedback and collaboration we’ve had with our customers – we could not have done it without you. Thank you for trusting us to deliver flawless automated testing for you, and we’re excited to head into the future of testing together.

Learn more

For more, you can read our full press release, or schedule a demo and see for yourself how Visual AI is helping industry leaders delivery visually perfect digital experiences.

The post Applitools Named Fastest-Growing Software Testing Vendor in North America appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

AI is needed to meet the scale and complexities of modern software delivery. According to the EMA report, traditional test automation tools will continue to struggle to keep up.

A growing challenge for organizations reliant on software (in other words, just about every organization today) is the ever-rising scale and speed of software delivery. Software is growing more complex, users are demanding more from their experiences, and release cycles are getting shorter and shorter. All of this puts an enormous strain on the testing teams charged with ensuring that applications are error-free and delivering the desired user experience.

AI is one technology that can ease this burden on today’s testers, according to EMA Research, which has just released a research paper on the topic. The need to create better software, faster, has never been greater.

“Business’s ability to accelerate the delivery of customer value through software innovation, at lower cost, has become critical for achieving competitive advantages,” said Torsten Volk, Enterprise Management Associates Managing Research Director.

Software Testing Complexity is Increasing

The report highlights a number of data points showing the increasing complexity of testing environments. The number of test automation-related questions posted to StackOverflow has nearly doubled over the past year. Smartphones continue to proliferate at a very high rate (30% CAGR since 2017 for Android alone), adding yet more configurations that need to be tested. Apps residing in a growing number of cloud services has risen 225% since 2015, compounding the complexity of software delivery.

In an article on the topic, VentureBeat recently highlighted another report on enterprise software development by Gatepoint Research which emphasizes some of the same struggles. According to that report, 77% of respondents said that they experience setbacks in releasing new software. A smaller but still high 34% said that fixing bugs takes anywhere from days to months.

Overall, EMA found that the increase in the complexity of technology, combined with faster release cycles and the daily tasks that already exists for test engineers, combines to yield an exponential increase in testing effort required. It doesn’t help that, as EMA puts it, “test automation frameworks typically rely on a jungle of test scripts written in different languages, using different sets of runtime parameters, and lacking consistent compliance test capabilities.”

AI is Critical to Modern Software Testing According to EMA

The research by Torsten Volk and his team makes clear in no uncertain terms that “you cannot scale automated testing without AI.”  The paper outlines how the latest AI solutions help in five key categories today, and digs into how AI can help address six of the biggest test automation pain points.

“AI-based test automation technologies can deliver real ROI today,” said Volk, “and come with the potential of addressing, and ultimately eliminating, today’s critical automation bottlenecks that stifle modern software delivery.”

EMA’s research discusses several essential AI capabilities that can combined and customized according to an organization’s requirements. Visual inspection (with Visual AI) was rated as having the highest overall impact of these capabilities, both today and in the future:

Smart crawling, self-healing, anomaly detection, and coverage detection each are point solutions that help organizations lower their risk of blind spots while decreasing human workload. Visual inspection goes further compared to these point solutions by aiming to understand application workflows and business requirements.

-Disrupting the Economics of Software Testing Through AI

To learn more, download the complementary report, “Disrupting the Economics of Testing Through AI.”

The post How AI Can Help Address Modern Software Testing appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

I stirred up a bit of controversy on Twitter by asking for unpopular opinions on software testing, and unsurprisingly, the community had some pretty hot takes! While I asked this some time ago, it appears that these takes are just as relevant today.

Trish Koo says “You don’t have to argue with people all the time to be a good tester”.

As testers, we are often thought of as the bearer of bad news and have accepted this as part of the job. We often find ourselves fighting for features and fixes in the name of customer advocacy. It doesn’t have to be this way. The best testers are the ones that people want to invite to the meetings. The best testers realize that their job is so much more than simply finding and logging bugs, as pointed out by Jason Phebus.

In fact, the best testers have not only found a way to become a part of the team, but have gotten their teams to realize that testing is a team sport.

Speaking of team sport, this one is from a developer who says “If you don’t start with tests, the design is probably garbage. I can’t think of any APIs I am responsible for and satisfied with that didn’t start with docs and tests”. This developer gets it! He understands his responsibility for quality even as a developer.

But I also often encourage testers not to leave the testing solely to developers during the design phase. As Jason Phebus said in the earlier tweet, logging bugs after the fact is the least interesting thing about testing. Get involved in your design meetings and help the team spot flaws in their approaches before a single line of code is written. Now, that’s powerful!

Let’s head on over to test automation…

Paul Grizzaffi says “A failing automation script does not necessarily mean that the script is wrong, horror of horrors, the script may be accurate”.

If you immediately question your test script when it fails, it could be a sign that you are not confident in this test. A lot of times people are not confident in the tests because they barely understand what it is that they’ve coded. As the director of Test Automation University, I have a lot of people ask me about learning Selenium or Appium, or some other automation tool. I get it, you need to learn the tool to be able to do the job. But can I tell you that you’re shortchanging yourself? Automation development is so much more than a tool. Learn the craft, learn the strategies, really learn to code! That way, when things fail, you know how to properly analyze what’s going on.

Just think about how much more value you can add if you’re truly code literate, as pointed out by Amber Race.

Even if you’re only able to read it, you now can understand much more about how your application works and sniff out poor coding practices that can lead to bugs.

And if you are writing code, you don’t have to stop just at automating tests. You can contribute so much more to automating processes, increasing test automatibility within the product itself, and even fixing bugs that are found.

You may be thinking “well Angie, if I’m doing all of that then I’m doing the job of a developer”. Yep, you absolutely are.

As Justin Ison so accurately says, quality managers expect you to test the entire site, write detailed bug reports, learn to program, automate all test cases, and setup CI/CD for half the salary of the developers creating the bugs!

So, to all of the quality managers and executives reading this, listen to David Burns and pay your testers the same salary as your developers, if not more!

Because “a tester’s mindset is the most powerful thing in computing”, says Orandi Harris. Know this, believe it, and act accordingly.

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We live in a day and age where web traffic and mobile app usage are at an all-time high. Recently, Verizon’s CEO recently reported that “In a week-over-week comparison, streaming demand increased 12%, web traffic climbed 20%, virtual private networks, or VPN, jumped 30% and gaming skyrocketed 75%.”

According to the 2019 State of Automated Visual Testing Report, 400 leading software companies reported that today’s typical “Digitally Transformed” company now boasts 28 unique web and mobile applications, each with 98 pages or screens per app, each in five different screen sizes, and in six different languages. This amounts to about 90,000 page and screen variations accessible every day by customers of a typical company. Visual bugs that are common in such a variety of different screen variations, cost a typical company more than $2m a year in R&D related costs.

One of the most important things to remember is that the visual appearance of a company’s website or mobile app directly reflects on brand recognition. So how can organizations make sure their brand reputation remains impeccable and makes them stay ahead of the competition?

Some say it takes only 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion about a website or an app. Within this very small amount of time, people determine whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave. And, as the saying goes “you get no second chance to make a good first impression.” So you need to make it look perfect on any device, any browser, and any screen size, from the first glance to the last. Any failure to do so can cause your customer to move to your competitor in a heartbeat. For more interesting stats about user experience, see https://www.sweor.com/firstimpressions.

These are the facts that should keep every one of us that has a “Digitally Transformed” business awake at night, looking for a solution as a top priority.

But is there a readily available solution to the above challenge?

The problem is that apps, websites and smart devices have proliferated to the point where any attempt by humans to manage visual and functional quality with the necessary timing and coverage is impossible. The number of screens and page variations is only expected to increase, and the software release cycles are only expected to become faster and faster to support Agile and CI/CD software development life cycles (SDLC). 

The only way to cope with this enormous problem in an automated way is by using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

According to Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Software Test Automation (December 17, 2019), “61% of [its 2019 Software Quality Tools and Practices Survey] respondents said that AI/ML features would be very valuable in software testing tools. Improved defect detection (48%), reduction in test maintenance cost (42%), and improved test coverage (41%) were seen as the top benefits expected from incorporating AI/ML into test automation (multiple answers were allowed).”

Another Gartner research report, Gartner’s Innovation Insight for AI-Augmented Development (May 31, 2019) published by Mark Driver, Van Baker and Thomas Murphy recommends that “application leaders should embrace AI-augmented development now, or risk falling further behind digital leaders.”

In the specific situation I have described, a specific type of AI is needed: Visual AI.

Visual AI is composed of various AI algorithms that mimic the human eye and brain. It can do the work that tens of people would do in weeks, in a matter of minutes, while integrating with the entire app development toolchain and would respond in realtime in the most demanding timing constraints of CI/CD.

As a final note, I would like to say that as the co-Founder and CEO of the company that invented Visual AI and serves more than 400 enterprise customers, many of which are part of the Fortune 500, this kind of technology is quickly becoming top of mind for business and technology leaders. If you’re looking to disrupt your market and beat your competition through innovative software development and delivery practices, you must add Visual AI to your secret sauce, in order to lead your business to prosperity. It was true yesterday and it is many times more important in this challenging time!

Gil Sever is CEO and Co-Founder at Applitools

Cover Photo by Tomas Yates on Unsplash

The post What Business and Technology Leaders Should Know about the Quality of their Web and Mobile Apps in this Challenging Time appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.