How to enhance product quality with visual testing

Delivering high-quality products is paramount for businesses to succeed today. User expectations continue to rise. So, even the slightest visual defect or inconsistency can harm a brand’s reputation and drive customers away.

Companies are introducing new products frequently. This means that modifications or upgrades occur indefinitely in every product or application. But how can one assure that these modifications do not have an influence on product quality, particularly the UI and UX? This is where visual testing emerges as a crucial technique to enhance product quality and ensure a flawless user experience across different devices and platforms.

What is Visual Testing?

Visual testing is a type of application testing that examines and tests the visual experience and behavior of a product or service. It helps to assess whether the product under examination has the desired visual look and appeal. It also guarantees that product updates do not damage functionality or negatively impact the user experience.

With applications being produced and used across a variety of devices, browsers, and operating systems, visual testing is becoming increasingly critical. It allows visual testers to:

• Gain insight into user satisfaction regarding the visual presentation of their product or application.
• Detect UI/UX issues at an early stage in the testing process and address them proactively to prevent any negative impact on user experience.
• Evaluate the rendering quality of website or application pages to verify the seamless presentation of content.
• Confirm that the visual elements in the web or mobile application align with the original design intentions.

Why Should You Prefer Automated Visual Testing?

As applications get more sophisticated, manual visual testing may become a tiresome and time-consuming method of ensuring visual accuracy. If you want to verify that your application or website is visually appealing, simple to use, and satisfies user expectations, you must automate visual testing. Automated visual testing can be useful in:

• Reducing the likelihood (and expenses) of errors linked with manual visual testing.
• Speeding up the visual testing procedure, thereby enhancing efficiency and punctuality in product launches.
• Guaranteeing uniformity among different visual elements of your product across various devices, browsers, and operating systems.
• Simplifying the replication of issues identified during manual visual tests and uncovering their underlying causes.
• Broadening test coverage to encompass a greater number of use cases and scenarios, thus ensuring comprehensive analysis without overlooking any blind spots.
• Streamlining testing costs and efforts while ensuring that the applications under test meet visual standards.

Enhancing product quality by performing visual testing

Implementing visual testing in your quality assurance process offers numerous benefits. It can significantly improve the overall quality of your products:

• Catch Visual Defects Early: Visual testing allows you to detect visual bugs and inconsistencies at an early stage in the development cycle. By catching these issues early, developers can address them promptly. It will reduce the cost and effort required to fix them later in the process.
• Ensure Consistency Across Devices and Browsers: With the ever-increasing number of devices, browsers, and screen resolutions, ensuring a consistent user experience across all platforms is a daunting task. Visual testing automates the process of capturing screenshots and comparing them across different environments. It helps to identify any layout, rendering, and responsiveness issues that may arise.
• Improve User Experience: A flawless visual experience is crucial for maintaining user satisfaction and loyalty. Visual testing helps ensure that your product looks and functions as intended, providing users with a consistent and delightful experience that can positively impact customer retention and brand perception.
• Enhance Regression Testing: Visual testing is an excellent capability that complements traditional functional testing. By incorporating visual testing into your regression suite, you can quickly identify any unintended visual changes introduced by new code or updates, ensuring that your product’s visual integrity remains intact throughout its development lifecycle.
• Streamline Manual Testing Efforts: While manual testing is still essential, visual testing can significantly reduce the time and effort required by automating the capture and comparison of screenshots. This frees up your QA team to focus on more complex scenarios and edge cases, leading to a more efficient and effective testing process.

To implement automated visual testing effectively, it’s essential to choose the right tools and follow best practices. Several open-source and commercial visual testing tools are available, such as Percy, Applitools, Chromatic, and Backstop.js. These visual testing tools typically integrate with popular test automation frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, or Puppeteer, making it easier to incorporate visual testing into your existing test infrastructure.

When implementing visual testing, it’s crucial to establish a solid baseline for comparison. This baseline should represent the expected visual state of your product, serving as a reference point for future comparisons. Additionally, it’s important to define user story acceptance criteria and tolerance levels to ensure that the visual rendering meets the functional requirements of the user story. These criteria should account for acceptable variations, such as differences in font rendering or anti-aliasing across different platform

Furthermore, visual testing should be integrated into your continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. By automating the capture and comparison of screenshots as part of your build and deployment processes, you can ensure that visual regressions are detected early and addressed promptly, preventing them from reaching production environments.

Embracing visual testing as part of your overall QA strategy can significantly enhance the quality of your products and provide a competitive edge in the market. By catching visual defects early, ensuring consistent rendering across devices, improving user experience, enhancing regression testing, and streamlining manual testing efforts, visual testing empowers businesses to deliver visually stunning and reliable products that delight their customers.

Final note

The application testing process can benefit greatly from the adoption of visual testing in an agile setting. Aspects of the visual aspects should be selected for coverage across devices and browsers, and visual testing activities should be included in the story/epic sizing in sprints/release. Issues should be maintained with a distinct tag or identification, and visual tests should be part of the automation test suite’s feature tests.

Visual testing tools can facilitate testing by providing alternatives for element, region, or page level validation; using AI to enhance productivity; and compressing various ‘asserts’ into purpose-based modes. The ability to bring an extra layer of quality to application delivery, boost resource efficiency and speed, boost trust in product releases, and offer usability and accessibility analytics are ultimately what make visual testing valuable. Product development teams may increase the overall quality of their products and improve the customer experience by using visual testing into their testing approach.