Ensuring a seamless visual experience for your website is critical to retaining customers and growing revenue. But as the complexity of web applications grows, it's becoming harder to catch UI changes before they're shipped to prod. In fact, companies typically find 6 to 10 visual bugs each month in their release cycles, and fixing a single visual bug can cost around 8 to 12 hours.
When unanticipated UI changes slip into production unnoticed, the consequences can be dire. According to Sauce Labs Every Experience Matters report, only 59% of consumers believe it’s possible to have a bad digital experience and still get a good product.
The solution is Sauce Visual.
What is Sauce Visual?
If you work as a software tester, you're likely already aware of visual testing and how it can help ensure a seamless user experience. However, you’ve likely encountered some challenges in implementing it: catching unanticipated UI changes, knowing how to incorporate visual testing into your automated test code, and having to switch between unrelated tools are all part of the headwinds your team will face when taking this important step. You need a solution that addresses visual bugs while streamlining test development and reducing maintenance time.
Sauce Visual, part of the Sauce Labs Platform for Test, allows you to seamlessly compare before-and-after screenshots from your automated tests. By incorporating visual checks into your tests with a single line of code, you can replace block after block of complicated element locators—the bane of any UI tester—and see clear indications of what changed. Then do this in the world’s fastest test infrastructure.
Simplify your test code and surface visual changes easily, then communicate these changes back to developers far earlier than before.
Why Sauce Visual?
Sauce Visual helps you find and fix visual errors quickly and offers the following features:
Easy bug identification: Locate visual differences quickly with minimal added code. Each snapshot check looks for differences across an entire image, imitating human perception.
Centralized UI: Run visual and functional tests and compare current test screenshots with baseline images, all within the Sauce Labs Platform for Test.
Multi-framework compatibility: Integrate visual testing into your CI/CD workflow using TestNG, JUnit, Mocha, WebDriverIO, or Cypress (with sauceCTL). More frameworks are coming soon!
With Sauce Visual, you can improve the visual experience of your app’s UI with greater testing efficiency, and achieve the following benefits:
Reduce test complexity: Shorten and simplify your tests by eliminating complicated assertion code. A single visual check can take the place of dozens or even hundreds of assertions.
Save time: Greatly reduce test creation, analysis, and maintenance time.
Improve your dev experience: Weave visual checks in with existing automated tests on any platform with just one line of code.
Leverage a single platform: Access Sauce Labs test results, insights, mobile app diagnostics, error/crash reporting, all in the same UI with Sauce Visual’s snapshot comparisons.
Take advantage of automation: Computers are better than humans at some things, like poring over hundreds or thousands of screenshots, picking up visual differences, and cataloging them. This allows a human to see the biggest changes up front and decide if the changes represent a defect or not.
Leave an audit trail: You need to be able to see who approved or rejected changes, so your team can share accountability and understand the history of your application’s changes.
Who is Sauce Visual For?
Sauce Visual is designed to provide QA engineer and SDETs with an easy and secure way to run visual tests. Here's how Sauce Labs allows you to:
Simplify test creation: Integrate visual checks throughout your UI tests to compare the layout to previous test executions. Surface any differences that might degrade your user experience.
Run tests seamlessly: Run your automated and visual tests on one platform, so you can go back and forth between them. No need for multiple logins, User Interfaces, or procurement processes.
Run on the world’s most secure test infrastructure:
Use Sauce Connect to do visual testing on internal apps/environments
Restrict access to who can analyze, approve, and reject Visual test results
Understand your app’s history: Sauce Visual tells you who approved or rejected each change
