People of all ages are becoming increasingly reliant on the Internet. This makes a huge number of websites available over the internet. All the services, whether it is government, public, or other fields, have their website on which the user can get their work done by using the internet. As a result, many websites are available for a single purpose: online shopping; there are hundreds of websites that users access.
But to make their website more attractive and provide the best possible user experience, they must develop it with attractive designs and layouts, which are also critical for client engagement. Visual validation or visual testing is the process that is used to meet these testing requirements. Visual testing aims to check the visual factors of the website, such as alignment, pixel-to-pixel comparison, rendering, layout, overlap, font change, responsive layout, etc., which is impossible to detect in functional testing.
In this article, you will see visual validation or visual testing, its benefits, and various pointers that will help you explore visual validation with Selenium testing.
Introduction to Visual Validation
Visual validation or visual testing is the process in which the QA team and testing team ensure that all the elements and components of the website are correctly presented to the users. This testing process ensures that all the features and functionality of a website or software application are shown to the end user as it was designed and developed, meeting all the client’s requirements.
Visual validation tests each visual component and checks if each element on the page appears in the right shape, size, and position, helping developers create a unified user experience. Using visual validation, the testing team can easily detect any visual discrepancies and bugs to find differences between what they want and what the website shows. Ultimately, this helps them ensure their product meets usability standards and is fully optimized across platforms.
With the incorporation of artificial intelligence with visual testing, the team can compare the visual defects and differences more accurately and in less time because the human eye cannot detect many minor visual differences that AI can do. Visual validation or visual testing helps provide the best visual user interface to the website users. Incorporating visual tests into the automation browser testing process is highly advantageous for any organization because it will gather users and provide many benefits.
Importance of Visual Validation
Let us discuss scenarios that show why we need to perform visual validations. Suppose a game comprises finding differences between the two identical images. The participating team must find minor differences between these images before the timer reaches zero. If they cannot find all the differences, they lose the game. While developing this game, there are scenarios when the testing team needs to check how much time is spent manually reviewing each UI and the possibility of releasing visual bugs into production.
Finding and identifying the changes manually is a very complex and hectic task. To handle this, visual validation or visual testing is used. Each time a test runs against the UI, it takes an image snapshot and automatically detects if any visual regression took place. Selenium is used for website testing. So, using Selenium for visual validation is a great way to perform automated browser Selenium testing.
Now, let us look at the various points that show how Visual testing is important in the website or web application automation testing process. These are:
- Consistent UI/UX Stability: Visual validation provides a method to test the visual appearance of the user interface and provide a consistent user experience across different types of devices. It also enables designers to rapidly identify visual discrepancies that might undermine user trust or engagement with an application. Testing and rectifying the visual components improves the user interface and user experience (UI/UX).
- Early Issue Identification: Visual testing helps to detect the issues at the early development stage. Early defect detection helps tackle swift issue resolution, minimizing the chances of flawed features. In this way, visual automation testing improves the overall software performance and efficiency.
- Cross-Platform and Cross-OS Support: Performing visual testing using Selenium helps detect and rectify visual errors. You can perform this visual testing with Selenium across various operating systems, such as macOS, Windows, etc and different browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers online, and various devices. Other visual testing tools are available in the market but are not multi-language and multi-platform supporting. Selenium reduces the pressure of choosing preferred operating systems, and the team can choose their preferred OS for performing visual validation. You can also use visual testing tools like LambdaTest for visual validation.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform to run manual and automated tests at scale. The platform allows you to perform both real-time and automation testing across 3000+ environments and real mobile devices.
It extends its testing capabilities to real mobile devices, providing a realistic environment for testing mobile applications. This includes testing various devices, operating systems, and screen sizes and addressing the complexities of mobile app development.
LambdaTest generates detailed reports and insights, offering visibility into the test results and performance metrics. This information is valuable for assessing the quality of the application, identifying potential issues, and making data-driven decisions.
In summary, LambdaTest is a remarkable and adaptable testing platform that offers a unique combination of AI-powered orchestration, manual and automated testing support, and an extensive range of testing environments. This makes it an ideal choice for teams and organizations aiming to improve their testing procedures and guarantee the strength and dependability of their applications in various scenarios. With LambdaTest, you can elevate your testing processes to new heights while ensuring the resilience and effectiveness of your applications across diverse situations.
- Better Deployment: Regular visual testing instills confidence in software releases, decreasing the likelihood of unexpected visual testing when rolling out updates or new features.
- Improved Testing Efficiency and Cost-Effective: Automated visual testing saves a lot of human effort and time, which is impossible in regular manual visual testing. Automated visual testing to remove defects with Selenium helps make your Selenium testing process effective and decreases the time for manual checks. This saved time can be used to contribute to other productive works of the organization.
Methods of Visual Validation Testing
Visual testing can be done using two approaches. You can perform visual validation or visual testing manually, known as Manual Visual Testing and the one is Automated Visual Testing.
Manual Visual Testing
Manual visual testing verifies the visual components and ensures they are working correctly and looks how they should be. Manual visual testing can be challenging for humans as it is more prone to human error because humans can make mistakes more than automated visual testing and AI-based testing. It is challenging to reproduce manually if you find any issues during the visual testing. Also, manual visual testing cannot cover every possible test scenario, which might lead to potential blind spots or missed bugs. Manual visual testing is also time-consuming, increasing the development time; hence, it is less beneficial than automated visual testing.
Automated Visual Testing
Automated visual testing uses tools and frameworks to validate your website visually. This type of testing uses automated tools to compare the visual elements of the software to a set of expected results. Manual writing test cases to solve visual defects required good coding skills and experience. With the help of automated visual testing, you can escape from this complexion. The tester can use the automated tools to write effective test scripts with much accuracy and less effort. Also, time is saved in this process.
Limitations of Visual Testing
Visual testing is very important when we talk about removing the detects in the visual components of your web app. Although it is a very powerful testing technique, there are some points where visual testing cannot detect bugs and errors. In this section, you will see the limitations of visual testing and which areas visual testing cannot provide its use. They are as follows:
- Security Testing: Security aspects of any web app or website are very important factors to consider. Security testing is done to verify the safety and security measures, such as identifying potential threats, vulnerabilities, weaknesses, unidentified access, etc. Any activity that may lead to security compromises must be identified and fixed in the security testing of a web app. But Visual testing is not capable of providing security testing to us.
- Functional Testing: Functional testing is the application testing process to ensure the application’s working and functionality. It ensures that the web app works by its specifications, ensuring that each feature, component, or interaction functions correctly and performs as intended, encompassing form submissions, user actions, data processing, and other essential operations. Unfortunately, Visual testing cannot perform functional testing for your web apps.
- API and Backend Testing: API and backend testing is the practice in which the testing team evaluates the functionality, working, and response of the various backend components of the application. The various backend components include APIs, databases, server-side operations, etc. So, you can not perform any backend or API testing while performing the visual testing. The reason is that visual testing focuses on the front end, requiring distinct methodologies to interact directly with and assess the backend systems and ensure their proper functioning and accuracy in handling data and operations.
- Accessibility Testing: Accessibility testing ensures the application is accessible to all the target users without any issues. It is a very important factor that confirms compliance with accessibility standards like WCAG. Also, it focuses on features such as compatibility with screen readers, keyboard navigation, contrast adjustments, and other elements to provide the best possible user experience for a diverse array of audiences.
Conclusion
Visual testing focuses on the appearance and behavior of the user interface, whereas functional testing focuses on testing the functionality of the software application. It is one of the major parts of website design because the goal of any organization is to make its website popular among users, which can be achieved by providing an attractive user interface and experience. Visual validation ensures that all the components and elements of the website are accessible in their original form to all users across various devices and platforms.
You can perform visual validation using a manual approach or automated approach. An automated approach is easier for the team as it requires less coding skill and it is more efficient in detecting visual defects that a normal human eye can not. Hope you got an idea about the various aspects of Selenium testing for visual validation after reading this article.
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