Get all the latest test automation videos you need in one place.

It’s summertime (at least where I am in the US), and this year has been a hot one. Summer is a great season to take a step back, to reflect, and hopefully to relax. The testing world moves so quickly sometimes, and while we’re all doing our jobs it can be hard to find the time to just pause, take a deep breath, and look around you at everything that’s new and growing.

Here at Applitools, we want to help you out with that. While you’ve hopefully been enjoying the nice weather, you may not have had a chance to see every video or event that you might have wanted to, or you may have missed some new developments you’d be interested in. So we’ve rounded up a few of our best test automation videos of the summer so far in one place.

All speakers are brilliant testing experts and we’re excited to share their talks with you – you’ll definitely want to check them all out below.

ICYMI: A few months back we also rounded up our top videos from the first half of 2022.

The State of UI/UX Testing: 2022 Results

Earlier this year, Applitools set out to conduct an industrywide survey on the state of testing in the UI/UX space. We surveyed over 800 testers, developers, designers, and digital thought leaders on the state of testing user interfaces and experiences in modern frontend development. Recently, our own Dan Giordano held a webinar to go over the results in detail. Take a look below – and don’t forget to download your free copy of the report.

Front-End Test Fest 2022

Front-End Test Fest 2022 was an amazing event, featuring leading speakers and testing experts sharing their knowledge on a wide range of topics. If you missed it, a great way to get started is with the thought-provoking opening keynote for the event given by Andrew Knight, AKA the Automation Panda. In this talk, titled The State of the Union for Front End Testing, Andrew explores seven major trends in front end testing to help unlock the best approaches, tools and frameworks you can use.

For more on Front-End Test Fest 2022 and to see all the talks, you can read this dedicated recap post or just head straight to our video library for the event.

Cypress Versus Playwright: Let the Code Speak

There are a lot of opinions out there on the best framework for test automation – why not let the code decide? In the latest installment in our popular versus series, Andrew Knight backs Playwright and goes head to head with Cypress expert Filip Hric. Round for round, Filip and Andy implement small coding challenges in JavaScript, and the live audience voted on the best solution. Who won the battle? You’ll have to watch to find out.

Just kidding, actually – at Applitools we want to make gaining testing knowledge easy, so why would we limit you to just one way of finding the answer? Filip Hric summarizes the code battle (including the final score) in a great recap blog post right here.

Can’t get enough of Cypress vs Playwright? Us either. That’s why we’re hosting a rematch to give these two heavyweights another chance to go head to head. Register today for to be a part of the Cypress vs Playwright Rematch Event on September 8th!

Coded vs. Codeless Testing Tools—And the Space In Between

There are a lot of testing debates out there, and coded vs codeless testing tools is one of the big ones. How can you know which is better, and when to use one or the other? Watch this panel discussion to see leading automation experts discuss the current landscape of coded and codeless tools. Learn what’s trending, common pitfalls with each approach, how a hybrid approach could work, and more.

Your panel for this event includes our own Anand Bagmar and Andrew Knight, along with Mush Honda, Chief Quality Architect and Coty Resenblath, CTO, both from Katalon.

Autonomous Testing, Test Cloud Infrastructure, and Emerging Trends in Software Testing

Looking to get a handle on the where testing is heading in the future? Hear from our Co-Founder and CEO, Gil Sever, as he sits down for a Q&A with QA Financial to discuss the future of testing. Learn about the ways autonomous testing is transforming the market, advancements in the cloud and AI, and the ups and downs of where testing could go in the next few years. Gil also shares insights he’s learned from our latest State of UI/UX Testing survey.

Test Automation Stories from Our Customers

We know that every day you and countless others are innovating in the test automation space, encountering challenges and discovering – or inventing – impressive solutions. Our hope is that hearing how others have solved a similar problem will help you understand that you’re not alone in facing these obstacles, and that their stories will give you a better understanding of your own challenges and spark new ways of thinking.

Automating Manufacturing Quality Control with Visual AI

We all know about web and mobile regression testing, but did you know that Visual AI is solving problems in the manufacturing space as well? Jerome Rieul, Test Automation Architect, explains how a major Swiss luxury brand uses uses Visual AI to detect changes in CAD drawings and surface issues before they hit production lines. A great example of an out-of-the-box application of technology leading to fantastic results.

Simplifying Test Automation with Codeless Tools and Visual AI

Test automation can be hard, and many shops struggle to do it effectively. One way to lower the learning curve is to take advantage of a codeless test automation tool – and that doesn’t mean you have to forego advanced and time-saving capabilities like Visual AI. In this webinar Applitools’ Nikhil Nigam shares how Visual AI can integrate seamlessly with codeless tools like Selenium IDE, Katalon Studio, and Tosca to supercharge verifications and meet industrial-grade needs. (And for more on codeless testing tools, don’t forget to watch our lively panel discussion!)

How EVERFI Moved from No Automation to Continuous Test Generation in 9 Months

Starting up test automation from scratch can be a daunting challenge – but it’s one that countless testing teams across the world have faced before you. In this informative talk, Greg Sypolt, VP of Quality Engineering, and Sneha Viswalingam, Director of Quality Engineering, both from EVERFI, share their journey. Learn about the tools they used, how they approached the project, and the time and productivity savings they achieved.

More to Come!

This is just a selection of our favorite test automation videos that we’ve shared with the community this summer. We’re continuously sharing more too – keep an eye on our upcoming events page to see what we have in store next.

What were your favorite videos? Check out our full video library here, and you can let us know your own favorites @Applitools.

The post Test Automation Video Summer Roundup: May-August 2022 appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

As a product manager at Applitools I am excited to announce an enriched and updated integration with Testim.io! This enhanced integration makes it easier for testers of any technical ability to use Applitools and our AI-powered visual testing platform by using Testim.io to easily create your test scripts.

What Is Testim.io Used For?

Testim.io is a cloud platform that allows users to create, execute, and maintain automated tests without using code.

It is a perfect tool for getting started with your first automated tests, if you do not have an existing automated testing framework or if you have not started to run tests yet. Testim.io allows you to integrate your own custom code into their steps so you can implement custom validations if you need to.

How Do Applitools and Testim.io Integrate?

The visual validation empowered by Applitools Eyes allows you to compare the visual differences between expected results (baseline) with actual results after creating the tests in Testim.io. By using Visual AI to compare snapshots Applitools Eyes can spot any unexpected changes and highlight them visually. This lets you expand your test coverage to include everything on a given page as well as visually verify your results quickly.

As part of the integration, you can modify test parameters to customize Eyes while working with the Testim UI.

This AI-based visual validation functionality is provided by Applitools and requires simple integration setup in the Eyes application. Learn more.

So, What’s New With Applitools and Testim.io?

This up-to-date integration provides access to Applitools’ latest and greatest capabilities, including Ultrafast Test Cloud, enabling ultrafast cross-browser and cross-platform functional and visual testing. Testim users also now have access to Root Cause Analysis and many more powerful Applitools features!

The new integration also greatly improves on the user experience of test creators adding Applitools Eyes checkpoints to their Testim.io tests. Visual validations can be added right inside Testim and the maintenance and analysis of test results is much simpler.

What Kind of Visual Validations Can You Do?

You can perform the following visual validations:

• Element Visualization – The Validate Element visualization step allows you to compare visual differences of a specific element between your baseline and your current test run.
• Viewport Visualization – The Validate Viewport allows you to compare the visual difference between your baseline and the current test run of your viewport.
• Full-page Visualization – Full-page validation allows you to compare the visual differences between your baseline and your current test run of your entire page.

What Are the New Visual Validation Settings?

Whether you select the element, viewport, or full-page visualization option you can always override the visual setting for that test or step.

The following Applitools Eyes settings can be accessed via the Testim.io UI:

• Add Environment (New) – allows you to select Ultrafast Test Cloud environments. You can select the same test to run on multiple environments: different browser types and viewports for web, Chrome emulation, or iOS simulation for mobile devices. Using Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud you can now increase your coverage and accelerate your release cycles.
  

• Match Level – When writing a visual test, sometimes we will want to change the comparison method between our test and its baseline, especially when dealing with applications that consist of dynamic content. Here you can update the Applitools Eyes match level directly from Testim UI.
• Enable RCA [Root Cause Analysis] (New) – when this flag is on it will provide insights into the causes of visual mismatches so that when looking at the Eyes dashboard you will be able to see the DOM and CSS that generated with the image.
• Ignore displacement (New) – when this flag is on it will hide differences caused by element displacements. This feature is useful, for example, where content is added or deleted, causing other elements on the page to be displaced and generating additional differences. 
  

User Experience Improvements

In addition to exposing new features in the Testim UI, we have provided better visibility to Testim tests in Applitools Eyes:

• Testim test properties are passed to the Eyes Dashboard to allow better filtering and grouping with all Testim tests properties.
• Testim multi-step and test suites are now also grouped on the Applitools Eyes dashboard and are displayed as one batch to create a better user experience when moving between the two products.
• Testim Selenium and extension modes are supported.

Complete and Scalable AI-Powered UI Testing

Testim.io allows users to quickly create and maintain tests through record and playback. Adding Applitools visual testing with Ultrafast Test Cloud capabilities will make sure your release cycles are short and test analysis and maintenance are easier than ever!

Learn More about Testim.io-Applitools Integration

If you want to learn more about how you can integrate your codeless Testim tests with Applitools and benefit from the latest Applitools capabilities, head over to Testim.io documentation.

Contact us if you have any queries about Applitools!

Happy testing!

The post Codeless End-to-End AI-Powered Cross Browser UI Testing with Applitools and Testim.io appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

For anyone trying to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, Microsoft has just quietly released a free tool that will make your life easier. Power Automate Desktop is a codeless tool that arose out of their Softomotive acquisition a year ago. Now fully integrated into Windows, it is available for free to all Windows 10 users.

In this step-by-step tutorial, we’ll learn how to use Microsoft Power Automate Desktop to automate an application without code. We’ll even learn how to codelessly test it visually too.

Automating with Power Automate Desktop

So what can be done with Power Automate Desktop? A better question might be, what can’t you do with it? Power Automate Desktop provides many already pre-built “Actions” to automate many different processes or applications out of  the box. For example, you may want to automate sending an email triggered by a particular event. Or you may want to extract values from an Excel spreadsheet and store them somewhere else like a database on Azure. If so, Power Automate Desktop has you covered along with hundreds of other similar actions. If an action you need doesn’t exist, no problem either. It’s easy to create one – so let’s go ahead and do so! 

A Codeless Example of Power Automate Desktop

For the context of this example. Let’s say you’re a tester and you’ve been tasked to automate your Windows desktop application. Where do you start!? You could go down the path of using a framework such as WinAppDriver, which is an Appium driver built and maintained by Microsoft to automate desktop Windows applications. However, with this approach you will need some coding experience and some knowledge of the framework to really provide a viable solution. There are other enterprise options such as Micro Focus’s UFT One, formally named QTP/UFT. But this too requires some coding knowledge to be successful, along with a hefty paid subscription. 

The beauty of Power Automate Desktop is that, not only is it completely free, but it can be 100% codeless and no coding knowledge or background is required. A Web and Desktop recorder is built in to record any UI elements or views you need to interact with for your automation, which can easily be plugged into your “Flow.” A Flow in Power Automate Desktop is essentially the same thing as “automation script” in the coding world. 

For this example we are going to use a very simple application: the Calculator app. 

Creating Your First Flow

1. If you haven’t done so already, download and install Power Automate Desktop.
2. Open Power Automate Desktop and create a New Flow.

   

3. This will open up the Action flow builder screen.
4. Let’s choose for our first action to “Run application” and set it to open the Calculator app.

   

5. We want to give it some time to wait for the Calculator application to start. There are many different wait actions we can use. I unfortunately didn’t have a lot of luck using some explicit waits so I used an implicit 5 second wait instead that gave me the desired result.

   

6. Next, let’s take a screenshot of the calculator application and store it in a folder in PNG format. We will use the “Take screenshot” action.

   Tip! Whenever you screenshot your application, make sure the application window is isolated (preferably with a dark background) and not overlapping any desktop icons or other windows. This will provide a much better image result.

   

7. We’ll now click on an element on the Calculator application. To do this we can use the action “Click UI element in window” and the built-in recorder by clicking the “Add a new UI element” button to detect an element, in this case the 8 button, to click. When hovering over the 8 button, you can use Ctrl+left click to store the element in your list. Set the Click type to Left click.

   

   

8. Go ahead and repeat the step above by adding 3 more “Click UI element in window” actions to multiply 8×8=64.

   

9. Add one more screenshot action (like in step 6 above). Give the screenshot filename something different than you did in step 6 and store it in the same folder. 
10. Finally, use the action “Close window” to close the Calculator application.

    

11. Now go ahead and execute your Flow by clicking the Run button! If all goes to plan, you should see the Calculator application launch, take a screenshot, multiply 8×8, take another screenshot and finally close the Calculator application.
12. Your two screenshot images should look similar to this:

    

Visually Validating Your Desktop App

So now let’s say you want to visually validate your desktop application with Applitools using our AI image comparison algorithms. But why would you want to visually validate your application? 

Why Visually Validate Your Application? 

Well the old saying goes “A picture is worth a thousand words.” That cannot be any truer than when it comes to testing. Factor in that in today’s software development world, the pace of releasing software updates is drastically increasing. A visual snapshot of your application can uncover bugs, visual discrepancies or layout issues you never knew existed and also ensure your Application’s UI still works and is functional. 

Like in this example, if 8×8 didn’t equal 64 we’d know right away something was wrong because the screenshot would look different. With an image, every visual attribute (text, color, location, etc..) of every element is automatically captured. 

Visual Testing with Power Automate Desktop

So lets add an action to upload our screenshots we took above to Applitools!

1. For this next step we have a few different options. Applitools provides over 50+ SDKs to do visual testing. You can integrate these SDKs directly into your automation framework or use one of our standalone codeless tools. Power Automate Desktop does provide actions to execute programmable scripts such as Python. However, for this example we are going to use our ImageTester CLI codeless tool (also known as the Screenshots CLI) to upload these screenshots from the command line. 
2. If you haven’t done so already, download the ImageTester and place it in a folder of your choosing on your PC. 
3. Next add your Applitools API Key to your System Environment Variables as APPLITOOLS_API_KEY.
4. Now we want to add another action called “Get environment variable” and place it after the “Close window” action.

   

5. Finally, let’s add one more action, “Run DOS command,” to execute the ImageTester CLI we downloaded above. This is where we’re going to use the API Key we are storing in the EnvironmentVariableValue above.

   

6. Your final Flow should look similar to this.

   

7. Now let’s run our Flow again! After this execution we should see our images in Applitools as new baselines.

   

Testing that is Automated and Visually Perfect

And that’s it! You now have stored baseline images of your application. So whenever your development team makes changes to your application in the future you can run this Power Automate Desktop Flow again to ensure your application still functionally works the same but is also visually perfect!

You can see the full Flow in action in the video below:

Applitools comes with many amazing features such as CI/CD integrations, bug tracking and accessibility testing, just to name a few. Visual testing with Applitools will help you improve your overall software quality, test smarter and more efficiently, and release application updates faster without sacrificing quality. Applitools is free so join Applitools today and see for yourself. 

And don’t forget to download Power Automate Desktop and play around with it now that it’s available. Happy testing!

The post Tutorial: How to Automate with Power Automate Desktop appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

Watch this on-demand session to discover what are the must-have features of codeless automation solutions, which testing challenges they help solve, and how to choose the solution that is right for your team.

Manual testing is necessary for certain types and modes of testing — but its inability to properly and quickly scale up creates major setbacks and bottlenecks for companies.

So what’s the answer?

We see organizations turning their attention and resources to codeless automation solutions in the hopes of solving the issues of speed, coverage, and maintenance — but how do you choose a solution that is right for your team?

In this session, we dived into the 5 key features you should look for in a codeless automation solution, discussed how each of those features helps solve different testing challenges, and demonstrated how those features work.

Dzung Ngo’s Slidedeck (Katalon)

Daniel Levy’s Slidedeck (Applitools)

Full Webinar Recording

Additional Resources

• When Codeless Meets AI — post by Dzung Ngo, VP of Product @ Katalon
• Angie Jones Presents: “Automated Visual Testing: A Fast Path To Test Automation Success” — ace automated visual testing with this free 9-chapter online course by industry leader Angie Jones, exclusive on Test Automation University!
• Whitepaper — The Impact of Visual AI on Test Automation Report — Empirical data from 288 quality engineers automating tests with Cypress, Selenium, and Webdriver IO
• Ask 288 Of Your Peers About Visual AI [post]
• Visual UI Testing as an Aid to Functional Testing [post by Gil Tayar]
• Start visually testing today — with your free Applitools account — open yours right here
• Click here to learn more about Katalon’s all-in-one test automation solution

— HAPPY TESTING —

The post Top 5 Features To Look for in a Codeless Automation Solution [webinar recording] appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

Katalon Studio and Applitools: When Codeless Meets AI

It is apparent that the world of high-tech products is moving faster. Production code is getting pushed more frequently, and products are growing faster than ever before, making quality at speed one a top priority. Now more than ever, teams need a solution that effectively shortens the testing cycle, yet ensures quality for the application under test.

Testing is an essential part of software development process. However, the approach to testing effectively is still disputed within the testing community: whether or not extensive coding skills are required to apply automated testing.

Katalon Studio, the leading codeless testing tool, is an ideal solution for teams without a comprehensive programming background. The tool allows for a simplified getting started process and robust testing capabilities to assure product performance.

It provides an all-in-one solution for all testing needs with an out-of-the-box framework for teams to accelerate quickly with automation and scale up easily as they grow. Applitools Visual AI platform combined with Katalon Studio’s codeless methodologies offer a seamless and integrated end-to-end testing solution for users.

The challenges of testing in the codeless era

As explained above, to successfully transition from manual testing to automated testing, teams might face a few challenges. Such change can affect their process of testing, the collaboration between team members, and project management.

Some major challenges for adopting automation can be listed as:

• Programming skills: For most automation platforms, the QA team must possess sufficient coding skills to write, execute, and maintain test scripts. For manual testers who just started the transition to automation testing from scratch, coding knowledge appears to be the most significant obstacle.
• Test flakiness: Most experienced testers agree that flakiness is a constant pain point in automation testing. Flaky tests occur due to many factors, including poorly written scripts, concurrency, async wait, test order dependency, etc. There is no absolute solution for flaky tests at the moment.
• Scalability: Functional automation testing is challenging at scale. As the method solely follows pre-written scripts, the QA team must have a clear and well-designed plan to successfully scale up the whole process. Apart from designing the test carefully, the team needs automated tools that are powerful enough for integration.
• Visual testing: Ensuring visual quality is vital since visual defects often impact functionality as well as the overall user experience. While some teams continue to manually test for visual defects, more and more modern teams have shifted to visual test automation and relying on advanced AI features to save time and money and ensure visual perfection.

Agile teams today need a solution that helps them accelerate testing without too much of a learning curve. Thus the emergence of codeless tools like Katalon Studio to help new automation testers quickly get used to the practices and drive valuable results for their team.

All the obstacles above can be easily overcome with the right tools and approaches. The combination of Applitools Visual AI Platform and Katalon Studio’s low code approach makes it simple for testers to automate test processes with minimal risk and guaranteed ROI for testing.

Going codeless using Katalon Studio and Applitools as the solution

In terms of skill demand and time limitation, codeless automation is the desirable solution for QA teams at all levels to best utilize automated testing. Codeless automated tools speed up the entire testing project significantly by cutting down the amount of time and effort spent on coding.

Katalon Studio is a test automation tool made for teams at any stage of testing with diverse application needs. The tool offers a wide range of integration capabilities and scales up options for teams to optimize their testing — all in a single downloadable package.

Feature-wise, Katalon Studio is a comprehensive tool with built-in capabilities for testing on all platforms and environments. It also provides native integrations with CI/CD tools, cloud executions, and test artifacts management tools.

Moreover, users can also leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) for visual testing with the integration with Applitools. This allows for more simplified UI testing with higher accuracy and proven testing performance. Besides applying AI, there are also more exciting innovations offered by codeless testing tools to solve the challenges above.

How to Configure the Applitools Integration Plugin in Katalon Studio

Go to Project/Settings/Plugins/Applitools Integration for configurations:

Where

• API Key: Required field. For quick testing, you only need to enter the API Key and leave out the rest.
• Application Name: Name of the application in Applitools. You don’t have to create an application in Applitools beforehand.
• Match Level: Match level in Applitools.
• Visual Grid View Port: list of viewports including width and height for Applitools Visual Grid. Once you have specified all browser images under, those viewports will be captured and compared.
  • [[width1, height1], [width2, height2], …] (e.g., [[800,600],[1200,630]])
  • leave empty: use the browser viewport at the point of execution

Visual Grid View Port configuration is applicable for both checkWindow and checkElement keywords.

It is possible to use the Applitools Integration plugin for both Recording and Scripting Modes in Katalon Studio. Please refer to Katalon Documentation to get an in-depth tutorial for this plugin.

You can get the Katalon Studio automation tool from www.katalon.com — create a free account, hit download, and you’re done!

About the Author

Dzung Ngo is Vice President of Product at Katalon with more than 10 years of experience in software engineering, especially software testing. Have a question for Dzung? You can reach him out via info@katalon.co

The post Katalon Studio and Applitools: When Codeless Meets AI appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.