AI applications in testing

Until my recent employment, I’d usually avoid image recognition in my automated tests, but there was no getting around it this time. I’d go as far as to call it Heresy, but I was genuinely interested in learning more about it.

I work for a company that produces eLearning authoring software for clients, all of which produce web-based courses with different layouts. On occasion, one of our releases may somehow break the course layouts which could have serious accessibility implications for learners, plus a lot of pressure for clients to resolve it.

To this end, the challenge was set: how do we automatically ensure that course layouts remain unchanged between deployments?

Standard WebDriver testing will get us so far functionally, but I wanted to see if it was possible to automatically copmarebefore and after images by using Selenium to navigate through a course and take screenshots at key points, do a deployment, then rerun the same test after and compare screenshots.

TL;DR we got image comparison working!

I’m keen to hear of other examples of AI techniques in automated testing

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It is possible to make a script in small increnents using an AI tool to compare the images before and after the changes. Here is a proof of concept.