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What is Lost Pixel?
Like other tests in software development (e.g., unit and integration tests), visual regression tests exist to detect regressions after changes to the code base have been made. In this case, the focus is on the visual aspect of unintended changes.
Visual regression tests do not replace unit and integration tests. They complement them and improve the quality of your delivery.
Visual regression testing 101
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Blogpost that can get you a fundamental understanding of visual regression tests
Especially the fact that the user interface is what your customers will see makes it even more important to have these quality checks in place.
Any developer must be confident that an introduced code change will not break the app. Manually visiting your app's page (and state) to check if everything is rendered correctly is neither pleasant nor effective. This is a process of the past.
Humans are great at many things - finding visual differences is not one of them.
A few examples that visual regression tests could help with:
Developer machines often carry history setups that keep being updated but rarely get a new setup state. They can sometimes deviate from staging and production environments. Catching the resulting differences in production is something that could be prevented.
If your team has designers and UX people, it could be of great value to review code changes by approving visual updates. Lost Pixel enables the review process by providing a screenshot of the version before and after the code change. This makes it super easy to understand what impact the change will have.
In bigger engineering teams, it is impossible to know and remember each change to the UI introduced by each developer. With good visual regression tests, developers stop worrying about what they might have broken on the other end of the application.
Visual regression testing 101
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Case studies on visual regression testing
Follow our handy guides to get started on the basics as quickly as possible:
Last modified 2mo ago