What is Visual Testing?

Visual testing is the practice of automatically verifying an app’s UI hasn’t changed in unexpected ways as a result of recent code changes. It can also be used to ensure consistent output across different browsers, devices, and environments.

Visual testing plugs a hole left by traditional unit testing and integration testing. Whereas those tests focus on the functionality of the code, visual testing ensures that visual layer remains consistent, usable, and accessible. It detects issues such as broken images, misaligned text, color inaccuracies, broken responsiveness, and other such problems that can greatly impact the user experience.

For example, let’s say you need to update the CSS targeting your product page. How can you be sure that this change didn’t inadvertently alter something on your site? Or what if a recent browser update drops support for a CSS property you were using? Visual testing can catch these issues before they reach your users.

How can BrowserCat help with Visual Testing?

Visual testing is a valuable practice, but it can easily slow down your test suite in both local development and CI/CD pipelines. BrowserCat fixes this by running your test suite on our fleet of headless browsers. This dramatically reduces the resource requiments of your test suite, and allows you to run more tests in parallel. We’ve seen users reduce their test suite runtime by 95%!

So give your GUI the love it deserves. Try BrowserCat for your visual testing today!