Heath has always found writing UI automated tests to be fun, at least relative to writing other kinds of tests. However, he understood the challenges with just how much to test beyond the data itself…the font? The color? The size? The position? How many browsers? How many screen resolutions?

Snapshot Testing (aka Visual testing) doesn’t address all of these but addresses a great many. At Sureify, Heath is working on a greenfield project with no existing UI tests and a couple of manual testers being brought into test automation. This was a great opportunity to implement snapshot testing.

Heath undertook a comparison of a few of the paid and open-source tools for snapshot testing, eventually adopting Percy from Browserstack for the balance of features and pricing options. Once it was figured out how to manage data, snapshot tests using Percy are proving to be a very effective way of testing thousands of data points for each screen captured.

Takeaways from the talk:

• Takeaways include key things to look for in a snapshot testing tool, one very effective way to manage data to support snapshot testing, and how functional test automation can be very simple to create and maintain while providing extensive test coverage.