An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
Applitools adds a layer of automated visual validation to existing testing frameworks, incorporating extensive machine learning to make tests more resilient to change.
If, as they assert, most software tests fail due to minor differences at the presentation layer, you would need an army of human eyeballs reviewing each release. That would never scale enough for high-velocity webscale applications.
This is a particularly hard problem to solve, as font styles, table sizes and even colors don’t render the same on all browsers and OS. If you ran a ‘pixel by pixel’ comparison between say, a web app on Chrome and Safari, the slight variations would cause false test system failures that wouldn’t register as problems to the human user either.
Rather than replacing investments in existing testing platforms, Applitools has found a seam offering a specialized AI-driven visual test enhancement platform. DevTest teams simply call on an API within their Selenium, Cypress or other tests scripts, and they get back automated ‘Visual AI’ inferences about the end user impact of any observed errors.
Of particular interest was their ‘ultrafast’ test cloud capability that uses Kubernetes to elastically spin up and release hundreds or thousands of cross-browser visual test lab instances on demand.
© 2021 Intellyx. At the time of writing, Applitools is not an Intellyx customer. None of the other vendors mentioned here are Intellyx clients. Want to see more BrainCandy? Subscribe today. If you are a vendor seeking coverage from Intellyx, please contact us at PR@intellyx.com.
