Visual smoke tests

Visual smoke tests check important pages in your application for correct loading, visual changes, broken links, JavaScript errors, and network activity issues across browsers.

This guide highlights some use cases and a sample workflow for visual smoke tests.

Use cases

Visual smoke tests can be used to complement an existing testing strategy in the following ways:

Validate key pages

The visual smoke test is great for continuous testing across your staging and production environments to validate that key pages from your application have a consistent appearance and are loading as expected.

If a visual change is detected, mabl generates a visual change insight.

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Configuring notifications for visual change insights

You can configure the mabl integrations for both Slack and Microsoft Teams to send notifications for visual change insights.

Test across browsers

Visual smoke tests can detect visual changes on all browsers supported by mabl.

Create targeted checks

Visual smoke tests only check for broken links on the URLs that you specify. They do not crawl your entire application.

Flag visual regressions

When you step through visual changes in a test run, you can use the review actions to accept, dismiss, or flag the new version as a visual regression.

Your workflow

Here is a sample workflow for visual smoke tests:

• Identify key pages for your web app and site based on your analytics
• Create a visual smoke test from the mabl app for those page URLs
• Run the test as part of a plan. If the test output includes visual changes, mabl generates visual change insights.
• Review results of tests that have visual changes. If there are unexpected visual changes, follow up with your team to address issues with the app or accept the visual changes as expected.

Learn more

• Visual smoke test setup
• Visual smoke test output