How to Find Root Cause Analysis in Your Visual Regressions with Hybrid Diff Benefits

Visual testing is important to implement because of the expectations of how web applications function- it is not only important to have your applications run properly, it is also important for them to look exactly the way you intend. Digital confidence is something that every user expects from their experience with any kind of application- which includes having a visually and functionally great experience. 

There are different offerings available for visual testing, but not all visual testing tools are created equal.  When looking for a visual testing tool, there are certain tools that do not provide enough of the debugging tools or deep dive necessary to assist you in more than just catching the bugs. The difference in some visual testing tools lies in their ability to provide a full breadth of tooling to do more than just identify the bugs but rather find the reasoning for the bug. If you can find the root cause analysis of why those visual regressions are passing in your tests, you and your organization can create a better testing and engineering organization. 

To find the right visual testing tools for you and your team, it is important to look for a visual testing tool that will provide technical aspects to find the root cause analysis. An example of these technical aspects can be found in the Sauce Visual product because it is based on a Smart Hybrid Diff model. Sauce Visual contains Smart Hybrid Diff that provides key features and benefits for visual testing that will assist your team in reducing false positives.

The Smart Hybrid Diff captures both a screenshot and a DOM snapshot to give you programmatic data and image data to perform a comparison. With this comparison, you will also be able to fully understand what specifically in the DOM structure has changed and identify those elements that changed. Other than the DOM snapshot coverage Sauce Visual provides, there is also the pixel to pixel comparison. Pixel to pixel comparison shows what visually changed in the UI, which is what most visual testing tools provide. By having both the pixel to pixel comparison as well as those DOM snapshots, visual regressions can be found and you can identify exactly what the changes were and how they occurred. The pixel to pixel comparison and DOM snapshots will then be able to work with your CSS as your web applications change and update to accommodate your Visual testing goals. 

After understanding the variety of ways the hybrid diff benefits of Sauce Visual can assist your testing experience, there's an opportunity to think even further about the ROI benefits that your company will achieve with the hybrid diff benefits. Being able to identify the root cause analysis is where you and your team will see a large impact- having this capability affects the time spent digging into the bug and the changes that will eventually need to be made to fix said bugs. Your team will save engineering hours both when finding the bugs and at the end of the testing cycle because your bugs have already been found prior. This leads to faster time to market and more efficient well-performing applications that will also lead to happier customers. Check out more information on Sauce Visual and happy testing!