Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Percy.io, a continuous visual integration tool

percy.io

11–20 of 57 posts

Re: Show HN: Percy.io, a continuous visual integration tool

#11

This looks promising. Our project has a plethora of selenium tests, but they're focused on functionality only, not appearance. We can tell there is a table, button, link, form, etc. and click it. On that side we're reliable. But we really let ourselves down sometimes with regressions to the look and feel of the application. Are there any competitor tools for this visual testing ?

You can try https://app.webmate.io. It's a hosted service for layout, regression, and cross-browser testing. Basic features are free. The diff-ing works on the DOM, is visualised in screenshots and identifies the XPath of elements that are found to be changed, removed, or added. Tests are run on browsers/vm that are part of the service, giving you access to 200+ os/browser combinations.

Re: Show HN: Percy.io, a continuous visual integration tool

#12

This is neat. Recently started doing Selenium tests with Scrutinizer CI, but we've had issues where the UI is broken and we find out a day later... I'll definitely keep an eye out for you guys

Woohoo! Glad to hear it. :) We have an annoucement-only mailing list if anyone doesn't want to sign up with GitHub: https://percy.io/#updates

Are you an one man army? Congrats! :) This is great. How do you plan to react to potential changes in rendering engines? Would those be shown as test failures as well?

Re: Show HN: Percy.io, a continuous visual integration tool

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woohoo! Glad to hear it. :) We have an annoucement-only mailing list if anyone doesn't want to sign up with GitHub: https://percy.io/#updates

Are you an one man army? Congrats! :) This is great. How do you plan to react to potential changes in rendering engines? Would those be shown as test failures as well?

Great question! And yes. :) My plan at the moment for that is, because I know which browser exactly it was rendered in originally, I can put a notice at the top of the page to say something like "We just upgraded our rendering browser! The diffs below might because of that and not because of a change you made." -- and then after that one build, things would be back to normal.

Re: Show HN: Percy.io, a continuous visual integration tool

#16
This seems like a really convenient way to watch for front-end changes, but how do things like margins work? Will my whole page be red because everything has been shifted around or squished?

Responsive capabilities will really improve usefulness, and the absence is somewhat of a deal-breaker. On responsive sites developers will have to eyeball each change even when using Percy, so checking the desktop resolution wouldn't be much additional effort relative to checking all other resolutions for each page.

On the biz-dev side, if it's going to be a paid product it might be a good idea to start charging ASAP!

Re: Show HN: Percy.io, a continuous visual integration tool

#17

If you are interested in how something like this was made, there was a good talk about building something like this at RailsConf this year: http://youtu.be/Q4ttqkIEM7g

It's an awesome talk! Jessica Dillion has actually helped me with Percy a bit. :) She's great, you can see her slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/jessicardillon/implementing-a-visu...

Re: Show HN: Percy.io, a continuous visual integration tool

#18
A coworker has has a small tool for accomplishing this: https://github.com/LesterTheTester/dfrnt

It has been integrated with Travis CI and GitHub pull requests so that non-passing diffs are appended as a comment to the pull request by a bot account.

If there's an intended diff, a pull request can also automatically be submitted against the original pull request which, on merge, updates the "gold master" images and allows the original pull request to pass.

Post reply on HN