Benefits of Visual Regression Testing by Test Evolve

1. Everything you need to know about Regression Testing

2. What is regression testing? Software regression testing is the process of testing your software features and functions to ensure that new recently introduced changes to the code have not inadvertently broken or detrimentally impacted existing working application features. For example, if an ecommerce website's product team decides to implement a new 'click and collect' feature for its customers, regression testing will quickly tell the delivery team whether any existing and closely related areas of functionality such as 'order confirmation screens/emails' or 'ship to address' have been unintentionally broken in the process of adding this new 'click and collect' feature.

3. What is the difference between regression testing and re-testing? Retesting is the process of testing a feature or function again because the test result upon execution, did not match the expected result. When a tester executes any kind of test, if it 'fails', they will immediately 'retest' it to ensure that the failure is recreatable. Now, a process of diagnosis begins.

4. Testers will need to determine the reason for the failure. Maybe the test environment is not performant enough, the data could be invalid or there may be a legitimate bug to be opened with the developers. The next 'retest' will occur when the reason for the failure has been addressed by the developers. If an accepted bug has been fixed, checked in and the test environment has been rebuilt, the tester can now 'retest' that feature and close the bug. At this stage, the test has concluded successfully for the first time and in future cycles of testing, that feature will now be 'regression' tested to ensure that it continues to pass and does not break again with the introduction of new changes in the future.

5. Why is regression testing important? Frequent and consistent regression testing enables delivery teams to understand rapidly if they have unintentionally introduced breaking changes to the application. With good requirements, software design, unit tests, code reviews and regression tests, organisations stand the best chance of continually delivering a high quality product with regular feature enhancements to their customers. The cost of resolving bugs nearer to production increases exponentially. Regression testing helps you find these bugs at the earliest possible detection point.

6. When should you do your regression testing?

7. The extent to which a testing team needs to undertake regression testing, is driven directly by the frequency with which the developers are committing code changes and deploying them to a test environment. A new build of code might only deliver half of a new feature, but it also brings an opportunity to immediately regression test other areas of the application. If a company subscribes to an agile software delivery way of working, the best time to regression test is with every deployment of code to an environment. By failing to regularly regression test, a delivery team is simply adding to its technical debt further down the line. It is well understood that the cost of fixing a bug rises significantly as time progresses and the nearer a feature is to production release. Regression testing early and frequently with consistent test coverage means that a delivery team can find and fix regression bugs at the earliest opportunity whilst the cost is still relatively low.

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