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From Design to Deployed: Introducing the Figma Plugin for Sauce Visual for Pixel-Perfect Releases
Bridge the disconnect between design and development. The new Figma plugin for Sauce Visual automates baseline creation, enables shift-left testing, and guarantees visual consistency with your approved Figma designs.
The gap between design and development is a persistent challenge in software delivery. Design files represent the ideal user experience, but translating that vision into a coded, interactive UI is where visual discrepancies often creep in.
We are thrilled to announce the availability of the Figma plugin for Sauce Visual, a powerful integration designed to bridge this gap, eliminate manual error, and ensure every experience is pixel-perfect.
The problem we're solving: the design-to-code disconnect
Today, Figma is the leading UI design tool. While design teams thrive on its collaborative canvas, sharing those final, approved designs with testing tools for validation has always been a painful, manual process.
Before this integration, product and engineering teams faced challenges such as:
Manual baseline creation: QA teams were tasked with manually taking screenshots or relying on developers to export static images of the intended UI. This step was tedious, prone to human error, and became outdated with any subsequent design tweak.
Delayed visual testing: Visual testing often started late in the cycle — after development was mostly complete. This meant visual regressions, which are often the most noticeable to users, were detected late, requiring expensive rework and slowing down the release pipeline.
Design drift: For designers or non-engineers, not having an automated visual validation mechanism introduces the risk that the final deployed code will suffer from "design drift," resulting in a user experience that silently deviates from the established Figma baseline.
The fundamental issues? The definitive design source in Figma was disconnected from the visual testing execution in Sauce Labs. And the UI that gets into production does not match the intended flow and user experience that was created in Figma. Ultimately, not finding these design discrepancies in pre-production testing usually means they take longer to find and fix once they are discovered.
The solution: shift-left visual testing
The Figma plugin for Sauce Visual addresses this by establishing a direct connection between the Figma design file (the source of truth) and your visual testing workflow in Sauce Visual.
This integration allows Sauce Visual to automatically detect any discrepancy between your pre-production or live-coded UIs and the original Figma designs, ensuring true pixel-perfect fidelity.
The plugin connects UI designs directly to visual testing, allowing product and engineering teams to use design files as the baseline, test at the screen or component level, and catch visual bugs before they reach production. It bridges design and QA, eliminates manual, error-prone steps, and ensures pixel-perfect releases.
Why this matters
The core value of the Figma plugin for Sauce Visual is achieving visual consistency with approved screen designs by automating the most error-prone part of the visual testing pipeline, resulting in a faster release cycle.
UI designers spend time working with users to carefully craft the screen designs, where every pixel is intentional. Any non-approved variation to these designs that makes it into production can degrade the user experience.
Benefits | How the Plugin Delivers |
Eliminate Manual Export Work | Integration automates the manual handling of design exports and screenshots, saving significant time for both design and QA teams. |
Enable Shift-Left UI Testing | Visual testing can now begin as soon as development starts. Developers can run tests in their local environments and catch visual regressions immediately after making code changes. |
Ensure Pixel-Perfect Fidelity | By testing against the intended design baseline in Figma, you prevent unnoticed UI issues and design drift from reaching production. |
Increase Engineering Efficiency | Automating baseline creation streamlines the entire process, increasing the velocity of innovation and reducing the cost of fixing late-stage visual bugs. |
Get started today
The Sauce Visual Figma plugin is currently available exclusively for customers who utilize Sauce Labs' Visual testing solution.
Ready to start using your design files as your official source of truth?
Automate your baselines, accelerate your releases, and ship with confidence knowing your approved design vision is perfectly realized in code.
Happy testing!
