Applitools announces ‘2019 State of Automated Visual Testing Report’ that highlights the competitive advantages of visual quality

Last week, Applitools, the provider of AI-powered end-to-end visual testing and monitoring, announced the “2019 State of Automated Visual Testing Report.” According to the report, as the number of screens and pages across applications, operating systems websites, and devices continue to grow, the continuous management of a web application’s visual quality becomes a competitive advantage for businesses worldwide.

The report has been conducted as an independent survey of over 350 companies and it outlines the research findings for visual testing and quality. It further identifies key patterns that bring excellence in Application Visual Management.

With the help of this research, organizations can now better understand the business challenges and opportunities that are associated with visual quality.

This year’s Automated Visual Testing Report covers a few important findings:

Visual bugs are common and they typically cost the R&D team between $1.75m and $6.9m annually to fix. The reports further says that the average release to production has 9 visual bugs. Also, over 30 percent of companies release more than 22 bugs per release that cost them over $143,000 per release. For a team that is pushing towards CI-CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) and releasing only four times per month, these common visual bugs affect the visual quality.

According to the report, with the increasing number of screens and pages, the increasing expectations of faster release cycles, the goal of continuous visual quality is going to be much more challenging in the future which would underscore the need for Visual AI to help meet it.

The findings further state that CI/CD and Digital Transformation initiatives are necessary for dealing with the enormous challenge of visual quality and according to over 64 percent of companies surveyed, these initiatives are either non-existent or failing to deliver as planned.

Companies that are using automated visual testing are building competitive advantage via improvements to quality, coverage, release velocity, and team morale. The findings show the overall app test coverage increasing by over 60 percent. It further shows the Visual quality improving by 3.6x and the monthly release velocity more than doubles.

According to the report, only 12 percent of companies surveyed are using automated visual testing as of Q1 2019, which suggests that competitive advantage is possible for those companies who quickly move to adopt the technique this year. Also by the end of this year, there would be an additional 38 percent of companies who would have initiated automated visual testing as a core strategy.

Gil Sever, Co-Founder and CEO of Applitools wrote in an email to us, “Today, software equals brand. Managing application quality effectively as releases occur more frequently is becoming a competitive advantage for all companies, regardless of vertical market, company size, or geography.”

He further added, “Continuous visual quality is now a goal for QA and software development teams as the stakes continue to get higher for organizations competing for customer attention and retention in this age of across the board digital transformation.”

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