As a product manager at Applitools I am excited to announce an enriched and updated integration with Testim.io! This enhanced integration makes it easier for testers of any technical ability to use Applitools and our AI-powered visual testing platform by using Testim.io to easily create your test scripts.

What Is Testim.io Used For?

Testim.io is a cloud platform that allows users to create, execute, and maintain automated tests without using code.

It is a perfect tool for getting started with your first automated tests, if you do not have an existing automated testing framework or if you have not started to run tests yet. Testim.io allows you to integrate your own custom code into their steps so you can implement custom validations if you need to.

How Do Applitools and Testim.io Integrate?

The visual validation empowered by Applitools Eyes allows you to compare the visual differences between expected results (baseline) with actual results after creating the tests in Testim.io. By using Visual AI to compare snapshots Applitools Eyes can spot any unexpected changes and highlight them visually. This lets you expand your test coverage to include everything on a given page as well as visually verify your results quickly.

As part of the integration, you can modify test parameters to customize Eyes while working with the Testim UI.

This AI-based visual validation functionality is provided by Applitools and requires simple integration setup in the Eyes application. Learn more.

So, What’s New With Applitools and Testim.io?

This up-to-date integration provides access to Applitools’ latest and greatest capabilities, including Ultrafast Test Cloud, enabling ultrafast cross-browser and cross-platform functional and visual testing. Testim users also now have access to Root Cause Analysis and many more powerful Applitools features!

The new integration also greatly improves on the user experience of test creators adding Applitools Eyes checkpoints to their Testim.io tests. Visual validations can be added right inside Testim and the maintenance and analysis of test results is much simpler.

What Kind of Visual Validations Can You Do?

You can perform the following visual validations:

• Element Visualization – The Validate Element visualization step allows you to compare visual differences of a specific element between your baseline and your current test run.
• Viewport Visualization – The Validate Viewport allows you to compare the visual difference between your baseline and the current test run of your viewport.
• Full-page Visualization – Full-page validation allows you to compare the visual differences between your baseline and your current test run of your entire page.

What Are the New Visual Validation Settings?

Whether you select the element, viewport, or full-page visualization option you can always override the visual setting for that test or step.

The following Applitools Eyes settings can be accessed via the Testim.io UI:

• Add Environment (New) – allows you to select Ultrafast Test Cloud environments. You can select the same test to run on multiple environments: different browser types and viewports for web, Chrome emulation, or iOS simulation for mobile devices. Using Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud you can now increase your coverage and accelerate your release cycles.
  

• Match Level – When writing a visual test, sometimes we will want to change the comparison method between our test and its baseline, especially when dealing with applications that consist of dynamic content. Here you can update the Applitools Eyes match level directly from Testim UI.
• Enable RCA [Root Cause Analysis] (New) – when this flag is on it will provide insights into the causes of visual mismatches so that when looking at the Eyes dashboard you will be able to see the DOM and CSS that generated with the image.
• Ignore displacement (New) – when this flag is on it will hide differences caused by element displacements. This feature is useful, for example, where content is added or deleted, causing other elements on the page to be displaced and generating additional differences. 
  

User Experience Improvements

In addition to exposing new features in the Testim UI, we have provided better visibility to Testim tests in Applitools Eyes:

• Testim test properties are passed to the Eyes Dashboard to allow better filtering and grouping with all Testim tests properties.
• Testim multi-step and test suites are now also grouped on the Applitools Eyes dashboard and are displayed as one batch to create a better user experience when moving between the two products.
• Testim Selenium and extension modes are supported.

Complete and Scalable AI-Powered UI Testing

Testim.io allows users to quickly create and maintain tests through record and playback. Adding Applitools visual testing with Ultrafast Test Cloud capabilities will make sure your release cycles are short and test analysis and maintenance are easier than ever!

Learn More about Testim.io-Applitools Integration

If you want to learn more about how you can integrate your codeless Testim tests with Applitools and benefit from the latest Applitools capabilities, head over to Testim.io documentation.

Contact us if you have any queries about Applitools!

Happy testing!

The post Codeless End-to-End AI-Powered Cross Browser UI Testing with Applitools and Testim.io appeared first on AI-Powered End-to-End Testing | Applitools.

For anyone trying to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, Microsoft has just quietly released a free tool that will make your life easier. Power Automate Desktop is a codeless tool that arose out of their Softomotive acquisition a year ago. Now fully integrated into Windows, it is available for free to all Windows 10 users.

In this step-by-step tutorial, we’ll learn how to use Microsoft Power Automate Desktop to automate an application without code. We’ll even learn how to codelessly test it visually too.

Automating with Power Automate Desktop

So what can be done with Power Automate Desktop? A better question might be, what can’t you do with it? Power Automate Desktop provides many already pre-built “Actions” to automate many different processes or applications out of  the box. For example, you may want to automate sending an email triggered by a particular event. Or you may want to extract values from an Excel spreadsheet and store them somewhere else like a database on Azure. If so, Power Automate Desktop has you covered along with hundreds of other similar actions. If an action you need doesn’t exist, no problem either. It’s easy to create one – so let’s go ahead and do so! 

A Codeless Example of Power Automate Desktop

For the context of this example. Let’s say you’re a tester and you’ve been tasked to automate your Windows desktop application. Where do you start!? You could go down the path of using a framework such as WinAppDriver, which is an Appium driver built and maintained by Microsoft to automate desktop Windows applications. However, with this approach you will need some coding experience and some knowledge of the framework to really provide a viable solution. There are other enterprise options such as Micro Focus’s UFT One, formally named QTP/UFT. But this too requires some coding knowledge to be successful, along with a hefty paid subscription. 

The beauty of Power Automate Desktop is that, not only is it completely free, but it can be 100% codeless and no coding knowledge or background is required. A Web and Desktop recorder is built in to record any UI elements or views you need to interact with for your automation, which can easily be plugged into your “Flow.” A Flow in Power Automate Desktop is essentially the same thing as “automation script” in the coding world. 

For this example we are going to use a very simple application: the Calculator app. 

Creating Your First Flow

1. If you haven’t done so already, download and install Power Automate Desktop.
2. Open Power Automate Desktop and create a New Flow.

   

3. This will open up the Action flow builder screen.
4. Let’s choose for our first action to “Run application” and set it to open the Calculator app.

   

5. We want to give it some time to wait for the Calculator application to start. There are many different wait actions we can use. I unfortunately didn’t have a lot of luck using some explicit waits so I used an implicit 5 second wait instead that gave me the desired result.

   

6. Next, let’s take a screenshot of the calculator application and store it in a folder in PNG format. We will use the “Take screenshot” action.
   

   Tip! Whenever you screenshot your application, make sure the application window is isolated (preferably with a dark background) and not overlapping any desktop icons or other windows. This will provide a much better image result.

   

7. We’ll now click on an element on the Calculator application. To do this we can use the action “Click UI element in window” and the built-in recorder by clicking the “Add a new UI element” button to detect an element, in this case the 8 button, to click. When hovering over the 8 button, you can use Ctrl+left click to store the element in your list. Set the Click type to Left click.

   

   

8. Go ahead and repeat the step above by adding 3 more “Click UI element in window” actions to multiply 8×8=64.

   

9. Add one more screenshot action (like in step 6 above). Give the screenshot filename something different than you did in step 6 and store it in the same folder. 
10. Finally, use the action “Close window” to close the Calculator application.

    

11. Now go ahead and execute your Flow by clicking the Run button! If all goes to plan, you should see the Calculator application launch, take a screenshot, multiply 8×8, take another screenshot and finally close the Calculator application.
12. Your two screenshot images should look similar to this:

    

Visually Validating Your Desktop App

So now let’s say you want to visually validate your desktop application with Applitools using our AI image comparison algorithms. But why would you want to visually validate your application? 

Why Visually Validate Your Application? 

Well the old saying goes “A picture is worth a thousand words.” That cannot be any truer than when it comes to testing. Factor in that in today’s software development world, the pace of releasing software updates is drastically increasing. A visual snapshot of your application can uncover bugs, visual discrepancies or layout issues you never knew existed and also ensure your Application’s UI still works and is functional. 

Like in this example, if 8×8 didn’t equal 64 we’d know right away something was wrong because the screenshot would look different. With an image, every visual attribute (text, color, location, etc..) of every element is automatically captured. 

Visual Testing with Power Automate Desktop

So lets add an action to upload our screenshots we took above to Applitools!

1. For this next step we have a few different options. Applitools provides over 50+ SDKs to do visual testing. You can integrate these SDKs directly into your automation framework or use one of our standalone codeless tools. Power Automate Desktop does provide actions to execute programmable scripts such as Python. However, for this example we are going to use our ImageTester CLI codeless tool (also known as the Screenshots CLI) to upload these screenshots from the command line. 
2. If you haven’t done so already, download the ImageTester and place it in a folder of your choosing on your PC. 
3. Next add your Applitools API Key to your System Environment Variables as APPLITOOLS_API_KEY.
4. Now we want to add another action called “Get environment variable” and place it after the “Close window” action.

   

5. Finally, let’s add one more action, “Run DOS command,” to execute the ImageTester CLI we downloaded above. This is where we’re going to use the API Key we are storing in the EnvironmentVariableValue above.

   

6. Your final Flow should look similar to this.

   

7. Now let’s run our Flow again! After this execution we should see our images in Applitools as new baselines.

   

Testing that is Automated and Visually Perfect

And that’s it! You now have stored baseline images of your application. So whenever your development team makes changes to your application in the future you can run this Power Automate Desktop Flow again to ensure your application still functionally works the same but is also visually perfect!

You can see the full Flow in action in the video below:

Applitools comes with many amazing features such as CI/CD integrations, bug tracking and accessibility testing, just to name a few. Visual testing with Applitools will help you improve your overall software quality, test smarter and more efficiently, and release application updates faster without sacrificing quality. Applitools is free so join Applitools today and see for yourself. 

And don’t forget to download Power Automate Desktop and play around with it now that it’s available. Happy testing!

The post Tutorial: How to Automate with Power Automate Desktop appeared first on AI-Powered End-to-End Testing | Applitools.

Watch this on-demand session to discover what are the must-have features of codeless automation solutions, which testing challenges they help solve, and how to choose the solution that is right for your team.

Manual testing is necessary for certain types and modes of testing — but its inability to properly and quickly scale up creates major setbacks and bottlenecks for companies.

So what’s the answer?

We see organizations turning their attention and resources to codeless automation solutions in the hopes of solving the issues of speed, coverage, and maintenance — but how do you choose a solution that is right for your team?

In this session, we dived into the 5 key features you should look for in a codeless automation solution, discussed how each of those features helps solve different testing challenges, and demonstrated how those features work.

Dzung Ngo’s Slidedeck (Katalon)

Daniel Levy’s Slidedeck (Applitools)

Full Webinar Recording

Additional Resources

• When Codeless Meets AI — post by Dzung Ngo, VP of Product @ Katalon
• Angie Jones Presents: “Automated Visual Testing: A Fast Path To Test Automation Success” — ace automated visual testing with this free 9-chapter online course by industry leader Angie Jones, exclusive on Test Automation University!
• Whitepaper — The Impact of Visual AI on Test Automation Report — Empirical data from 288 quality engineers automating tests with Cypress, Selenium, and Webdriver IO
• Ask 288 Of Your Peers About Visual AI [post]
• Visual UI Testing as an Aid to Functional Testing [post by Gil Tayar]
• Start visually testing today — with your free Applitools account — open yours right here
• Click here to learn more about Katalon’s all-in-one test automation solution

— HAPPY TESTING —

The post Top 5 Features To Look for in a Codeless Automation Solution [webinar recording] appeared first on AI-Powered End-to-End Testing | Applitools.