Doron Zavelevsky is our principal software engineer and frontend engineering team lead. He was one of the first software engineers to join Applitools five years ago to help us build our AI-driven visual UI testing tools for Selenium, Appium, and dozens of other test automation frameworks.

Doron has created a role that allows him to combine his passion for solving complex problems, and hunger to learn more. He created a community through React Israel that encourages the software developer community to share their stories and knowledge.

We sat down with Doron to hear about what his frontend engineering team are doing, and also what he looks for when interviewing potential front-end software developers for Applitools! Read more…

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Next week, we’re joining IT and DevOps leaders, practitioners and friends at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco for DevOps World | Jenkins World.

What is DevOps World | Jenkins World? DevOps World | Jenkins World is an international event that provides opportunities to learn, explore, network and help shape the future of DevOps and Jenkins continuous integration server. This year, it will be hosted at two separate locations: San Francisco, California from September 16-19, and Nice, France from October 22-25.Read more…

You know what’s crazy about software?

It’s the fact that, for many businesses, applications are a big revenue driver — maybe even the ONLY revenue driver. But we have no system of record to manage the development of our application user interfaces.

Let me explain.

Suppose your company’s revenue drops off. You learn that over the past quarter, revenue coming from mobile app has declined significantly.

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Take a guess: how long have we been dealing with software bugs?

It’s not 30 years, around the time Windows was first released.

It’s not 48 years, the start of the Unix epoch.

It’s actually much longer. 71 years and 2 days, to be exact. Here’s why.

Back on September 9, 1947, Grace Hopper, a Harvard computer scientist, was running tests on a calculator and found calculation errors. She did some investigation and found a moth that had landed between two solenoid contacts, shorting out an electromechanical relay. Apparently, the bug had been attracted by the warmth of the machine.

We now commemorate this occasion every September 9, Tester’s Day.

As you can see in her logbook entry below, dated September 9, the actual offending month was taped to the page. So not only is the first known example of a software bug, it’s probably the most tangible example of one as well.

The first known bug, via Wikipedia

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Kevin Lamping; Front-end Engineer and Consultant; learn.webdriver.io

For years, front-end developers have dealt with the pain of browser-based bugs and the difficulty of testing hundreds of scenarios. They’re itching for help with front-end testing, but have struggled to find a solution that scales past a few simple tests. They have the skills to write test automation, just not the support.

Now, more than ever, is the time to team up front-end developers with QA teams. So much functionality has shifted to the front-end that past practices will no longer work. We need to focus on solid solutions that have been proven in the workforce.

In this session — hosted by Kevin Lamping, Front-end Engineer and Consultant — you’ll learn how you can build a Front-end Testing Discipline using cutting-edge tools and techniques, along with patterns to follow in organizations at various levels.

Here are some of the talking points Kevin covers in this session:

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Angie Jones

Applitools’ Angie Jones up for Test Automation Expert of the Year in Tricentis’ 2018 Testing Heroes Awards.

First thing’s first – we’d like to formally welcome Angie Jones to the Applitools team as our Senior Developer Advocate! Exciting things are certain to come with her on board, so stay tuned for more news soon.

In the meantime – we are thrilled to see Angie on the shortlist for the Tricentis 2018 Testing Heroes Awards. The annual Testing Heroes Awards (#TestingHeroes2018) recognize the outstanding individual contributions within the software testing community, and awards Tester of the Year, Test Manager of the Year, The Explorer, The Performer, The Automator and The Risk-o-Meter. Nominations are closed and voting for the finalists is now open.

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Kanika Pandey — APAC Regional Director @ Applitools

Applitools brings visual UI testing to the Australian Testing Days event in Sydney NSW this Friday, and Applitools’ APAC Regional Director Kanika Pandey will present her talk: “Black Swans – The Rise and Fall of Automation”. 

On August 24, 2018, the Applitools team is sponsoring and speaking at Australian Testing Days Conference in Sydney, Australia (@AussieTesters).

What is Australian Testing Days? 

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The other day, I was supposed to meet a colleague for drinks at the local bar. He was a bit late, as he got delayed at work. When he arrived at the bar, after a drink or two, he asked if I could take a look at the problem he had. “Sure, why not,” I said.

First, some background: we’re both in the testing business. I am a software developer at Applitools where I develop visual UI testing software tools based on artificial intelligence algorithms. My friend is a test automation engineer working on automated testing in a web SaaS company. One of his responsibilities is to make sure new versions don’t have any unexpected bugs. Read more…

Gil Tayar, Sr. Architect and Evangelist @ Applitools

“You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression!
Join me for this hands-on session, where I will take existing tests and add to them visual testing capabilities that will allow you to test what your app looks like, and not only how it behaves. I promise: all this goodness – in just 8 lines of code!”

– Gil Tayar, Sr. Architect & Evangelist

Learn how to implement visual testing in your existing test suite, so you can increase coverage and ensure your app’s UI is bug-free when it’s released to the wild.

Watch this hands-on session with Gil Tayar right here.

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Why is Jira so hard to use for bug tracking? This seems to be a continual refrain heard on the web: “Jira isn’t suited for Agile development”. “Jira is complex and bloated”. “People cram too much information into Jira”. Another common complaint is that Jira tickets are simply unmanageable.

Organizing JIRA tickets pic.twitter.com/2YeDNc7tcf

— Mike Herchel (@mikeherchel) October 2, 2017

But, love it or hate it, Atlassian Jira is very popular for bug tracking and can be found within many software development organizations worldwide. If your workplace is one of the many that uses Jira, you might want to consider using Applitools Eyes to make your visual user interface (UI) testing easier.

First, some background: Applitools Eyes lets you automate visual UI testing of your web and mobile application front end. Using Applitools Eyes ensures that your application’s UI is displayed consistently and accurately across any device, browser, or viewport. Atlassian Jira manages your development workflow, task tracking, issue management, and reporting.

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Until the late 1960s, no one thought computers needed a user interface (UI), and the UIs that did exist were expensive and primitive. At the time, these UIs were being used by the military for air defense systems, were built as academic research projects, or were used as props in science fiction movies.

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All organizations that build software realize that testing is an integral part of the software development process. Like many important tasks and processes, it is not fun. When we are assigned testing tasks, we regard them as an unwanted burden. 

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Many people think of GitHub as a niche website that hosts open-source projects. In June 2018, that niche website with a mere 28 million users got more media attention than Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). Somehow, a site that provides free services was so valuable that Microsoft acquired them for $7.5 billion US dollars.

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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?

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In this webinar — hosted by Sumeet Mandloi, Engineering Director @ Dow Jones (Wall Street Journal), and Eran Barlev (Sr. Customer Success Engineer @ Applitools) — you’ll learn how you can easily avoid front-end bugs and visual regressions, as well as substantially increase coverage, by adding automated visual testing to your existing automated test suite.

In addition, Mr. Mandloi shared real-life tips on how to run automated visual testing at scale, with implementation examples from Dow Jones.

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As a genre, fantasy is often looked down upon by fans and writers of science fiction. There are some who argue that the worlds created by JRR Tolkien were influenced by the events of the early twentieth century. No matter how you interpret his works, one of the central themes of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that remains timeless is that if you come into possession of and use something powerful, like an all-powerful magic ring, you should be prepared for the harm it can cause.

Before we get too carried away with Tolkien references, this post is about visual UI testing, not hobbits. Similar to Tolkien’s central theme, the goal of this post is to inform you that any time you use visual UI testing, you should consider the broader issues it involves. Specifically, this post explores the reasons why developers who use visual testing need to think about more than simply testing the parts of a web app that they can see. It’s the things you cannot see that will trip you up, not the things you can see. Many of these unseen page elements have very little to do with the application itself or its underlying code, but are caused by the display technologies that are used to present the application to users.

This post explains how the hardware and software technologies that are designed to make displayed content look better will cause your visual tests to fail. We also offer Applitools Eyes as a solution that can help you avoid these problems and their consequences.

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Every morning, just before we leave our house, my seven-year-old daughter and I love to spend a few minutes playing the spot-it game located on the last page of our local newspaper. She always spots all the differences before me, and it makes her day knowing that she won. (Plus it makes my day seeing her glow, knowing that her day started on the right foot.)

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As front end developers, our job is to present visual information that looks good and gives users cues to help them understand content quickly. Even a static, text-only web page is more than a collection of words. The page has a title that appears at the top. The title may be bold or in a large font size. In the body of the text, words are grouped into sentences that end with periods, and related sentences are grouped into paragraphs. Certain words in a sentence may be emphasized with bolding, underlining, or italics. These examples barely scratch the surface of the many, minute details of visual web page design.

These components may seem basic and unimportant, but for many people, accessing and reading text on a web page is difficult. For example, individuals with visual impairments often struggle to read the text. When we think of visual impairment, most of us automatically picture a person who is blind, but there are many other types of visual impairment to consider, including color blindness, low vision, sight problems caused by degenerative disorders, etc. The range of disabilities and handicaps our users may have extends far beyond the visual category to include hearing, cognitive, motor, and other types of issues. Therefore, making sure your website or application is accessible rises to the utmost importance. 

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Applitools closes out an incredible month of June by taking visual UI testing to the Selenium Conference in Bengaluru, India. 

From June 28-30, 2018, Applitools is sponsoring and participating at SeleniumConf India in Bengaluru (@seleniumconf).

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Applitools is a 2018 Red Herring Top 100 North America Winner

Red Herring Top 100 recognized the most promising privately-held companies in North America, and Applitools was recognized for its Application Visual Management market expansion leveraging AI Powered Visual UI Testing. 

It’s always an honor to be recognized for your hard work. So when the 2018 Red Herring Top 100 North America Awards were announced, and Applitools was included, we were both excited and humbled to be included on this prestigious list alongside some amazing and innovative growth companies.

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In the days before web applications, programmers wrote applications for a specific platform and used that platform’s native development environment and user interface controls. Before the application’s final release, a tester would check that the application was ready. Some testers wrote elaborate documents that described complicated scenarios they performed on the software manually. Other, more adventurous testers used fancy tools that were the quality assurance version of Microsoft’s Word and Excel macro recorders. A tester would record a series of actions on the software under test. These steps were recorded in a high-level language in which the tester could edit the code and add test conditions that would verify that the actual results of the test matched the expected results. Each time a test was run, a report was generated that showed which conditions had been passed or failed.

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Award program recognizes the leaders in the software development space, and this year, Applitools brings visual UI testing to the community. 

Recently, SD Times, the leading monthly magazine for Software and Development Managers, DevOps teams, Test & QA professionals and CIO’s announced their annual SD Times 100 awards, and Applitools was named a “Best in Show” for the software testing category.

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It’s not often that software testing makes the news, but when it does, it’s usually because something within the test automation has gone spectacularly wrong. At 8:05 AM on January 13, 2018, the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency sent out a false missile alert. While there is much that is still unclear regarding exactly what happened, most reports agree that an internal test was treated as a real event. According to The Washington Post, part of the problem may have been caused by a human operator who chose the “Missile alert” instead of the “Test missile alert” from an application menu.

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Applitools heads to Test Automation Day to speak on visual UI testing. 

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At some point while each of us were growing up, we wished that the adults in our lives would just disappear. They made our lives miserable with their arbitrary rules and restrictions, but they got to do all kinds of fun things. After all, how hard could it be to drive a car, and why did we need them to watch an R-rated movie or to cross the street?

Well, front end developers have a similar fantasy. Their wish is that one day, all back end developers will move out of their way and let them take control. Front end developers are responsible for the things people see and use. All the back end developers need to do is create REST APIs and HTTP endpoints that work and return well-formed JSON, and the front end developers do the rest.

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We have some exciting news to share as we end the week. In recognition of our innovative visual UI testing and monitoring technology, we’ve been selected as a finalist for the Red Herring 100 North America. Every year Red Herring recognizes the most promising privately-held companies in North America based upon their technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health. During the months leading up to today’s announcement, Red Herring reviewed over 1,200 companies in the telecommunications, security, cloud, software, hardware, biotech, mobile and other industries that completed their submissions to qualify for the award.

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Watch the full recording of this hands-on advanced session right here.

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Have you ever asked yourself why all apps aren’t web apps? Well, this is actually already the case on desktops and most of the apps you use at home and/or at work. When it comes to productivity apps, Microsoft, Apple, and Google all have full-featured web apps that are just as capable as locally installed desktop applications. As long as you have good wired or wireless internet, you can do nearly all of your work in Chrome, Edge, or Safari. Apart from specific categories, such as graphics, video editing, software development, and high-end gaming, you can do nearly everything in a web browser.

Mobile, however, is a different story.

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It is probably safe to assume that any developers reading this article are already testing their applications. At the bare minimum, you’re testing the feature you’re working on as you develop it and checking that it works with any existing code. Many of you are probably using some form of automated functional testing as well. These types of testing are certainly important and they help to ensure that your applications work as expected, but adding visual testing into the mix will improve your testing significantly.

Today, users access applications in a variety of ways, including wearables, smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop PCs and an increasing range of smart devices. Now, developers need to account for the ways in which these new and diverse technologies change how their software is presented to and perceived by their users. The typical forms of testing we’ve relied upon for so long simply can’t detect the problems that may exist on every possible device. This is why developers now need to test the visual aspects of their applications. In recent years, developers have started using visual testing methods, tools, and frameworks to meet these new challenges.  

In this post, we make the case that it’s wise to use visual testing. Even if you, your team, or your organization are old hands at automated functional testing, we’ll explain why you should add visual testing into your existing infrastructure. We also offer advice about available tools, frameworks and solutions that will help you get started. Whether you’re a novice developer or a seasoned veteran, the information presented in this post will help you deliver the best experience for your users.

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