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InfoQ Homepage News Applitools Expands Application Visual Management Capabilities

Applitools Expands Application Visual Management Capabilities

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Application Visual Management (AVM) focuses on the monitoring and testing of visual aspects of the application delivery lifecycle. Applitools Eyes Version 10 provides new UI baseline management, team collaboration, expanded third-party tool integrations and improved analytics dashboards.

AVM is the convergence of testing, image processing and artificial intelligence tools that identify when applications look visually incorrect when released or when a platform, device or browser changes and results in a visual defect. Applitools uses artificial intelligence that mimics the human eye and brain automating visual testing and making it available to a continuous delivery pipeline and Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) tests.

Gil Sever, CEO of Applitools says:

Application Visual Management represents the evolution of automated testing, and builds upon the established Application Performance Management market, to automate the task of monitoring the visual appearance of what customers see and interact with every day across all their devices.

Applitools has collected 100 million visual tests by analysing billions of individual UX elements. Dave Haeffner, author of The Selenium Guidebook, says:

Visual testing is the act of verifying that an application’s graphical user interface (GUI) appears correctly to its users. The goal of the activity is to find visual bugs (e.g., font, layout, and rendering issues) so they can be fixed before the end-user sees them. Additionally, visual testing can be used to verify content on a page. This is ideal for sites that have graphical functionality (e.g., charts, dashboards, etc.) since verification with traditional automated functional testing tools can be very challenging. Given the number of variables (e.g., web browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, responsive design, internationalization, etc.) the nature of visual testing can be complex.

New Applitools Eyes analytics dashboards allow individual engineers, team leaders and business leaders to review analytics that surface root cause visual test failures relevant to a specific environment. Users can review visual test execution status and baseline status updates, bugs squashed, and coverage levels specific to individual tasks assignments. A new drill down capability also provides analysis into a single test or single user view.

Test automation engineers can include a visual component in a continuous integration and delivery pipeline. New capabilities in Version 10 enable automated baseline updates for similar changes and can ticket the UI bug or update the baseline with a single "accept" or "reject" command followed by a JIRA ticket. Testers can also see an aggregated view of all "similar" UI bugs, prioritized by frequency of occurrence.

Applitools Eyes includes new collaboration features for cross-functional teams and provides unified visibility of Visual Testing results based on existing CI, rendering services, bug tracking and collaboration tools, in addition to most Appium or Selenium test languages. New validation regions for test step viewers allows users to provide context on potential UI issues to shorten release time. New integrations with MicroFocus and Slack become available in March.

A new SDK is available for PDF forms allowing customers that use these formats in highly regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, to leverage automated visual testing on PDF forms to check for compliance. XCTest Screenshots have also been added to extend visual test coverage to this screenshot type.

Applitools Eyes is available in the cloud or on premise and ships with integrations to TeamCity, Jenkins, Atlassian JIRA and Bamboo, Microsoft VSTS, Slack, Travis, Circle CI and HP Quality Center. Applitools was founded in 2013 and launched their product, Applitools Eyes, in 2015. There are currently 48 employees based mainly in Israel and San Mateo with satellite offices in the UK and Australia. Customers include: Microsoft, Slack, Sony, Adidas, AIG, Capital One, National Australia Group, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Salesforce.com, Oracle, GSK, Johnson & Johnson and Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy.

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