Percy.io: we’re live!
Originally published at blog.percy.io on May 29, 2015.
I am thrilled and delighted to announce the launch of percy.io!
What’s in a name?
Percy’s goal is to help us as engineers embrace a new practice that is converging in the industry — in fact, the practice is new enough that we haven’t even converged on a term for it yet.
They’ve been called “visual regression tests”, “perceptual diffs”, “pdiffs”, “visual diffs”, “CSS tests”, “automated visual difference tests”, and everything in between. But it all refers to the same principle: you have lots of tests for all the deep intricacies and corners of your software, so why don’t you have any tests for what your users actually see?
And the answer, of course, is that it’s hard.
Testing a unit of code automatically and continuously is effortless nowadays, but how do you write a test for that CSS bug you’ve fixed 40 times? How do you safely refactor the styling for a complex app and all of its UI states and permutations?
Perceptual diffs to the rescue
Various engineering teams have found an answer in the form of perceptual diffs:
If you haven’t watched Brett Slatkin’s canonical talk on perceptual diffs and how he accidentally launched a literal dancing pony to production, you should. More recently, Jessica Dillon’s great CSS testing talk has also been making the rounds.
For the handful of teams I’ve met who are already doing automated visual testing, they understand the power of it — how much QA time it saves, how it helps catch visual regressions early, etc.
But, usually people follow that positivity with, “I just wish it was easier, I wish there was a one-click solution.”
That’s the goal of Percy — to make continuous visual integration so simple and fast that it can become a mainstream engineering practice.
Whoa, whoa — did you see the new term just slip in there?
I’d like to throw my hat in to the ring with this one: “continuous visual integration.” That is how I describe Percy to people, because I feel the phrase encompasses the full experience I want in my development workflow. There’s a big difference between having perceptual diffs and having perceptual diffs automatically, continuously, for every build, integrating every code change that any developer makes. That’s the hard problem, and the one we aim to help solve.
Just as your team’s continuous integration workflow helps you always know that the build is green, we need better tools to have that kind of instant coverage for our application UIs.
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Check out percy.io to see what all this is about and sign up for an invite! We’re working hard with our first few customers to get this off the ground and iron things out, and I can’t wait to open it up for everyone.
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Let us know what you think by following @percy_io on Twitter!
Originally published at blog.percy.io on May 29, 2015.
