Visual testing and Diffy with Yuri Gerasymov

This week on the Beyond Blocks podcast, I'm joined by Yuri Gerasymov to discuss Diffy visual regression testing.

Talking Points

What is visual regression testing?

How do you deal with false positives?

Different use cases for visual regression testing.

Automatic updates.

Scheduling content.

Visual regression testing in CI.

Diffy in WordPress.

What's a baseline?

Initial setup and onboarding feedback.

Testing dark mode?

Component testing with Storybook and Fractal?

Testing local environments.

Testing as authenticated users.

The roadmap for Diffy.

Quotable Quotes

We help development teams to have less visual bugs in their website. We take screenshots of the pages and compare them so you can see what changed and how. (YG)

We built tools for you to mock the content. You provide selectors for the elements with the content of the article and we'll replace it with lorem ipsum text so it will be exactly the same across multiple environments. (YG)

I can still write an assertion to check the text is on the page or not, but it won't confirm it's in the correct place. (OD)

Having a tool checking for changes on a regular basis instead of only after a deployment would be very useful. (OD)

So, you could have a tool like Violinist automatically creating pull requests and Diffy checking those PRs, so the two could work together? (OD)

With visual testing, it's very easy to get started. (YG)

Visual testing is great for showing your client your work. (YG)

I learned a lot during this conversation and have added visual regression testing to my testing toolbox for working on projects.