Since March, many fellow developers and software testers have been working from home, making online communities that much more important to keep in touch with trends and best practices.

Slack is one of the most popular collaboration tools in the market today, both as an internal tool for teams working together and for external groups who share similar interest and need a place to collaborate and share ideas.

Slack also offers a free tier which is used by many public communities such as software developers and testers. This tier includes unlimited private and public channels, 10K messages, up to 10 apps (Github, Bitbucket, etc.), file sharing, custom notifications and more.

Over a year ago, as part of my work at Applitools, I curated a collection of practical public Slack channels which are a must for every tester. Thinking back on this past year – I thought it would be a great time to update this.

Ministry of Testing

Ministry of Testing is great community which contains over 10,500 software testing specialists who are ready to help with any software testing related question you may have. Some of the popular channels include Automation, Exploratory Testing, Mobile Testing, Continuous Integration, API Testing and more. The Job channel is also very active so make sure to check this one out. Also, don’t miss out the Blog channel which aggregates some of the industry best blogs you want to follow.

Join the Ministry of Testing community here.

Test Automation University

The Test Automation University Slack group is the only free online software testing courses library. Speakers include Angie Jones, Dave Haeffner, Jason Arbon, Amber Race and more. This community has over 8,300 members and is fast-growing.Some of the popular channels include Java Programming, Performance Testing, Scale with Docker, and more.

Join the Test Automation University community here.

Sign up for Test Automation University.

Robot Framework

The Robot Slack community has about 8,200 Robot framework fans. If you don’t know the Robot Framework, it is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development. There is an amazing newbie channel for anyone who is just starting to use the framework. The Python, Appium, and RIDE channels are also quite popular and contain valuable information shared by fellow friendly testers.

Join the Robot Framework community.

Selenium

SeleniumHQ’s Slack is a great community with about 8,000 members. Most popular topics include Selenium, Selenium IDE, Jenkins, Appium, WebDriverIO, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python and more. Members are super friendly and helpful, ready to answer questions and tackle challenges we all face on a daily basis. Plus it has a job posting channel for those who are in the market or those who are hiring.

Join the Selenium community here.

TechWell Hub

Techwell’s Slack is the best source to learn what’s going on in our community. They just announced they passed the 5700 members count so you should be in good company. Popular channels include Agile, DevOps, Security, Strategy, AI, Women who Test, Leadership and more. Plus since they host Star East/West/Canada and Agile Testing Days, it makes this channel a great place to chat with fellow conference attendees.

Join the TechWell Hub community here.

Cypress Gitter Community

Slack is not the only game in town, and we’d be hard pressed not to give a shout out to our friends over at Cypress.io. Their community on Gitter has 9100 members and is a must for those working with or considering Cypress.io for test automation.

Join the Cypress Gitter community.

This is an updated version of a 2019 post previously published by DZone.

The post 2020 Top Slack Channels for Software Testers appeared first on AI-Powered End-to-End Testing | Applitools.

Slack is the hottest collaboration tool in the market today, both as an internal tool for teams working together and for external groups who share similar interest and need a place to collaborate and share ideas.

Slack also offers a free tier which is used by many public communities such as software developers and testers. This tier includes unlimited private and public channels, 10K messages, up to 10 apps (Github, Bitbucket, etc.), file sharing, custom notifications and more.

In the past year of my work at Applitools I curated a collection of practical public Slack channels which are a must for every tester.

Selenium

SeleniumHQ’s Slack is a great community with about 5,000 members. Most popular topics include Selenium, Selenium IDE, Jenkins, Appium, WebDriverIO, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python and more. Members are super friendly and helpful, ready to answer questions and tackle challenges we all face on a daily basis. Plus it has a job posting channel for those who are in the market or those who are hiring.

Join the Selenium community here.

Robot Framework

The Robot Slack community has about 5,000 Robot framework fans. If you don’t know the Robot Framework, it is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development. There is an amazing newbie channel for anyone who is just starting to use the framework. The Python, Appium, and RIDE channels are also quite popular and contain valuable information shared by fellow friendly testers.

Join Robot Framework community here.

Ministry of Testing

Ministry of Testing is great community which contains over 5,000 software testing specialists who are ready to help with any software testing related question you may have. Some of the popular channels include Automation, Exploratory Testing, Mobile Testing, Continous Integration, API Testing and more. The Job channel is also very active so make sure to check this one out. Also, don’t miss out the Blog channel which aggregates some of the industry best blogs you want to follow.

Join the Ministry of Testing community here.

TechWell Hub

Techwell’s Slack is the best source to learn what’s going on in our community. They just announced they passed the 3000 members count so you should be in good company. Popular channels include Agile, DevOps, Security, Strategy, AI, Women who Test, Leadership and more. Plus since they host Star East/West/Canada and Agile Testing Days, it makes this channel a great place to chat with fellow conference attendees.

Join TechWell Hub community here.

Test Automation University

The Test Automation University Slack group is the only free online software testing courses library. Speakers include Angie Jones, Dave Haeffner, Jason Arbon, Amber Race and more. This community has over 1,500 members and is fast-growing.Some of the popular channels include Java Programming, Performance Testing, Scale with Docker, and more.

Join Test Automation University community here.

A version of this article was previously published by DZone.

For More Information about Applitools

• Sign up for Test Automation University
• Request a demo.
• Sign up for a free Applitools account.
• Check out the Applitools tutorials.

The post 2019 Top Slack Channels for Software Testers appeared first on AI-Powered End-to-End Testing | Applitools.

Update: We have recently released a new, native Slack integration. For additional details please visit our step by step guide for Applitools & Slack integration.

One of the great things about Slack is the long list of integrations available. Whether it’s an integration as foundational as Google Drive, GitHub, or Zendesk — or as whimsical as Lunch Train — there are Slack integrations for a wide range of use cases.

Here’s an example of Slack’s GitHub integration:

With that backdrop, we’d like to show you how to integrate your Applitools Eyes visual UI test results into one of your Slack channels — something that our customers have frequently requested.

This step-by-step tutorial uses the Slack incoming webhooks API.

First, some background:

Slack provides APIs to users to create applications and to automate processes, such as sending automatic notifications based on human input, sending alerts on specified conditions, and more. The Slack API has been noted for its compatibility with many types of applications, frameworks, and services.

Once you build this tutorial, you’ll be able to view test results on any Slack client: your laptop, your phone. Or even via notifications on your Apple Watch, if you’re stuck in a meeting and don’t want to open your phone. You’ll be the first to know if your app has a visual glitch that you’ll need to fix.

With that, let’s dive into what you need to do  to bring Applitools into your Slack channel:

Step 1: Set up your Slack endpoint

1. Per Slack recommendations, create a “sandbox” account for Slack for your experiments before integrating it with your team Slack account: https://slack.com/create
2. Follow these instructions to see how you post your first “Hello world” message to your new Slack channel: https://api.slack.com/tutorials/slack-apps-hello-world
3. Copy and keep your webhook URL (always better to add this webhook URL to your environment variables, but I’ll leave it to you).

Step 2: Getting Applitools Eyes Test Results

1. Switch to whatever IDE you use to write automated test scripts that call the Applitools API, and open one of those scripts.
2. Towards the end of your test scripts, you should have a call to eyes.Close(). Here’s its documentation for our Java, JavaScript, C#, and Python SDKs. For scripts written in Java, it will look something like this:

   TestResults res = eyes.close(false);

3. This call returns a TestResults object. Additional information about Applitools TestResults can be found here.

Step 3: Connecting The Dots

The example below is in Java; however, you can figure out how to achieve this in any language you are using (with minor differences) as the TestResults object is accessible also in JavaScript, Python, Ruby, C#, and PHP. I’ve followed the instructions in this article to create the code below but feel free to customize it to your specific team needs.

1. Create class EyesSlack and add the following code in it:

View the code on Gist.

2. Now let’s see how we use this class in our tests:

View the code on Gist.

3. All you need to do now is run it to see your Applitools Eyes Test Results right in your Slack channel.

Here is an example of the screen message in Slack:

If you want to see my own experience putting together this blog post, check out this video:

Now that you tested it in your sandbox you are ready to merge into your team slack account – simply replace the webhook URL and you are good to go.

Looking for additional integrations with Applitools? Here are my favorites:

• JIRA and Applitools Integration
• Jenkins and Applitools Integration
• Azure DevOps and Applitools Integration
• GitHub and Applitools Integration
• TeamCity and Applitools Integration

The post Integrate test results into Slack [step-by-step tutorial] appeared first on AI-Powered End-to-End Testing | Applitools.

The QA team is the last frontier before your customers get their hands on your latest product version. Assuming your testing team has already completed smoke testing, integration tests, functional tests, end-to-end tests, acceptance tests and performance tests (not necessarily in that order) there’s still one piece of the puzzle: visual UI testing of your app front end.

The way many companies visually test their applications using image comparison tools. Some of these are free and some are paid. But in either case, these tools are not always reliable and often deliver false-positives (false alarms) that only frustrate both frontend developers and testers, and ultimately making you ship software late.

How Does Image Comparison Work?

Image comparison is simply pixel-by-pixel comparison, nothing more. Each and every pixel color in the base image is compared to the equivalent pixel in the checkpoint image. If all pixel colors match both images are identical. The chance of this technique working flawlessly is very slim. For this reason, image comparison tools give the user parameters to adjust such as pixel/color tolerance, which is the number of pixels that are allowed to differ between the two images.

But that’s not enough.

There are many ways in which images might seem to be identical but the pixels don’t match. Why does image comparison fail? There are many reasons:

Mouse Hovers

Even if the mouse points is not grabbed in a screenshot it may actually be hovering over an element that can be affected by it. Because changing the appearance of an element is trivial to do in CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, React, Angular, Vue, and other front-end developer technologies, this pattern is quite common in web apps. 

Here’s an example from a website you might be familiar with. In the top screenshot, the mouse isn’t hovering over the Google Search button; in the bottom screenshot, it is. See the difference?

Input Caret

If you have a text element that is in focus it may have a blinking caret in it. Suppose when you did your baseline test, you captured a screenshot of the cursor. Then when you do your test, your screenshot captures the page at the instant when the cursor is invisible. A simplistic pixel comparison will fail, even though the UI doesn’t have a bug.

Here’s an example of this. In the top screenshot, the cursor is visible; in the bottom, it isn’t.

Font Anti-Aliasing

Each operating system renders fonts differently to make the font smoother and easier to read. It’s not just a Mac-versus-Windows thing; even an operating system upgrade can change font smoothing. Additionally, your testers might change a font smoothing setting without realizing how it will impact visual testing.

The point is, any of these can make simplistic pixel comparisons fail, even when there isn’t a visual UI bug.

For this reason, it’s crucial for testers to understand how to control font smoothing on their test platforms. On macOS, the font smoothing setting is in System Preferences > General: 

In Windows, ClearType is the technology used for font smoothing and can be turned on and off in the settings. The exact method varies by Windows version.

If pixel-based bitmap comparison is part of your test automation, you’ll want to ensure a consistent font smoothing setting programmatically. Here’s how to do that on macOS, and how to do it in Windows (if these techniques seem complicated — that’s one of many reasons customers use Applitools. More on that below). 

User Interface Themes

If your testing team switches the user interface visual theme on a test computer, that will change image screenshots and cause simple pixel comparison tools to fail. These changes are very easy to make on both macOS and Windows, meaning it’s all too easy for testers to introduce changes that will visual UI tests.

Different Monitors

Higher resolution screens like the Apple Retina Display have more pixel density, so much so that pixels are not visible to the human eye. A screenshot taken on retina screen and a monitor with less pixel density will fail a simple pixel comparison, even if, to the human eye, there’s no apparent difference.

Here’s an example. The image on the top is a non-retina display on an iPhone 3GS. The image on the bottom is from an iPhone 4’s retina display.

Neither one of these has a visual bug, but it’s obvious that they wouldn’t pass a simple pixel comparison, even if the battery levels were the same.

Graphics Cards

When different computers have different graphics cards, they can produce different screenshots. Or fuzzier screenshots. And even if you don’t change your graphics card, an older card that is about to fail can introduce screen glitches that lead to different screenshots over time.

Visually Testing Dynamic Content

In the real world your apps are not static and content changes constantly, using image comparison will not cut it to validate all pages in your app since you can’t automatically create a baseline for your tests. It takes more than pixel-by-pixel comparison to achieve that and manual testing is not a scalable solution either.

A good example of this is Gannett, the company behind USA Today and dozens of other news publications. They can’t use pixel comparison, because their screenshots constantly change as breaking news stories are added to their websites. For USA Today and other new sites, there is no constant but change itself.

AI To The Rescue

By emulating the human eye and brain, Applitools AI powered Visual UI Testing technology only reports differences that are perceptible to users and reliably ignore invisible rendering, size and position differences. The algorithms can instantly validate entire application pages, detect layout issues, and process the most complex and dynamic pages.

When writing an automated visual UI test, sometimes we will want to change the comparison method between our test and its baseline image, especially when dealing with applications that contain dynamic content.

Applitools Eyes can test the UI in four different comparison levels: 

Here is how those comparison levels vary:

1. Exact: pixel-to-pixel comparison. If you really want to do exact pixel comparisons, you can still use Applitools.
2. Strict: compares everything including content (text), fonts, layout, colors and position of each of the elements. Strict knows to ignore rendering changes that are not visible to people. Strict is the recommended match level when running regression tests on the same browser/OS.
3. Content: works in a similar way to Strict except for the fact that it ignores colors.
4. Layout: compares the layouts (i.e. structure) of the baseline and actual images. It validates the alignment and relative position of all elements on the page, such as buttons, menus, text areas, paragraphs, images, and columns. It ignores the content, color and other style changes between the pages. Gannett uses layout mode extensively to test the layout of USA Today and other news sites.

Layout: Changing the Game

Applitools’ layout mode algorithm reverse-engineers the structure of the compared images by applying complex image processing algorithms resulting with the logical page structure of each image that includes all the components of the page. Then, it proceeds to map each component with its counterpart in the other image which allows detection of missing or new elements as well as misplaced ones. All such elements are considered different and are highlighted as such in the comparison result.

Layout mode will have greater benefits than other match levels in certain scenarios, which most notably include: dynamic content, language localization, responsive design, and cross-environment testing (including operating systems, browsers, devices, and form factors) since it is a more flexible approach of visual testing will have greater benefits.

But don’t take my word for it. In the following example (video below) I run a search in Google Images for two different keywords, grab screenshots of both results using Applitools Eyes, and show how Exact match level (which is doing pixel-by-pixel comparison) fails and Layout match level pass. Applitools Eyes is able to reverse engineer the image layout and the relation between all the UI elements on the page while ignoring the actual content of those images and text.

Pretty cool, right? 

To learn more about Applitools’ visual UI testing and application visual management (AVM) solutions, check out the tutorials on the Applitools website. To get started with Applitools, request a demo, or sign up for a free Applitools account.

The post Why Screenshot Image Comparison Tools Fail With Dynamic Visual Content appeared first on AI-Powered End-to-End Testing | Applitools.