Visual Testing with Percy on Automate

Get an overview of visual testing with Percy on Automate and its benefits

Integrating functional and visual testing can greatly enhance your ability to catch UI regressions and ensure the visual consistency of your application. By integrating Percy with your functional testing pipeline, you can seamlessly capture screenshots during your functional test runs and compare them to baseline images.

Browser selection management

Browser selection management enables you to select all the browsers you want to run your visual tests from a single place. The more the browsers, the higher your visual test coverage.

Users can create a Web Percy project and decide how the browsers should be handled. Percy offers two options listed below:

To select the browsers to test on, first, create a Web project in Percy. You have two ways to select browsers:

• Percy(Default) - This is Percy’s native cross-browser testing functionality and is selected by default. To know about how this works, see Cross-browser visual testing.
  • If you want to run visual tests only on the latest browsers, select Percy. Your tests run at a high processing speed. If you want twice the speed, purchase the enterprise plan for Percy.
• Automate - You manage browsers with Automate capabilities. When the functional tests run, Percy directly captures the required screenshots.

  • If you want to run visual tests on a variety of desktop OS, Mobile OS, Mobile devices, and browser combinations, select Automate. If you want to boost the test processing speed, consider purchasing parallels in Automate.

    

Percy on Automate

If you choose the “Automate” option when creating a Percy project, the “browsers selection” option will not appear in the project settings. Instead, the selection of browsers will be based on the capabilities specified in the Automate session.

You can use the Percy Screenshot command to capture a screenshot when a page is rendered during an Automate session. This screenshot is directly sent to the Percy build for comparison.

Check out the video below to get an overview of Percy on Automate:

Benefits of Percy on Automate

• Using Percy on Automate is cost-effective and performant.
  • It supports a single pipeline for functional and visual testing.
  • It saves lot of network traffic as we are directly uploading screenshots from BrowserStack terminal to Percy cloud.
• Tell us the capture movement and Percy will take screenshot of that movement as it supports css pseudo classes.
• It supports third party automated testing platforms including in-house setups.
• Exposure to highest browser and devices coverage while using BrowserStack Automate.

Limitations

• Internet Explorer is not supported.
• For Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge, browser versions less than 91 are not supported.
• Mojave and older versions of macOS are not supported.
• The FreezeAnimatedImage option does not have support for macOS Catalina and earlier versions.
• Chromium on iPhone is not supported.

Compatibility Matrix

Check if Percy on Automate supports your framework by referring to the following matrix:

Note: Write us at support@browserstack.com to raise a feature request.