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I've been here for years now but I have finally added a tag. Consider me a newbie on this and critically review Visual Testing About

I've tagged it on How to test UI frameworks and will add it to other questions as I find them.

If I'm going about this wrong in anyway feel free to sit me down and give me a talking to.

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    Do you want really any kind of UI testing to be included under the term "Visual Testing"? I mean, any kind of testing (manual or automated) of UI applications, using the UI? Or is your focus with this term more on "visual inspection"?
    – Doc Brown
    Feb 28, 2021 at 10:21
  • @DocBrown: I had the same thought. My initial reaction was it focused more on the visual aspect, especially given the question that was tagged.
    – Greg Burghardt
    Feb 28, 2021 at 16:12
  • Ok, I searched a little bit through the site and placed the tag at 6 older questions where I think it could be a good fit. Please check if that's the category of questions you had in mind with the tag
    – Doc Brown
    Feb 28, 2021 at 21:28
  • ... and since you started with this tag, may I suggest you try to find more question where it fits to in your eyes? That would give us a better basis for evaluating the description.
    – Doc Brown
    Mar 1, 2021 at 18:33
  • @DocBrown I found this that seems to fit. Thanks for the feedback and the tagging. Everything you and Greg are doing are great improvements in my eyes.
    – candied_orange
    Mar 2, 2021 at 9:05

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Visual testing, also known as user interface (UI) testing in software development is how developers ensure that an application appears to the end-user as it was originally intended.

From the description of the tag or feels like ui-testing is the more appropriate name, but that isn't what you are going for. I ended editing the description to include that visual testing is a form, of subset of, UI testing.

At first I was a little confused about the mention of UI testing. The term "UI testing" conjures up a number of other related terms, in my opinion:

  • Manual testing/verification
  • A specialization of unit testing focused on testing user interface components
  • A specialization of integration testing focused on user interface components

Basically testing a user interface, in general, at any level of the architecture.

Yesterday I thought I found an existing tag called "ui-testing", but I couldn't find it today. I ended up editing the visual-testing tag description this morning without knowing I could no longer find the "ui-testing" tag:

Visual testing, a form of user interface (UI) testing in software development, is how developers ensure that an application appears to the end-user as it was originally intended. This could involve manual verification using your eyes or programmatically interpreting images of application screens.

I added emphasis to the parts I changed. I think this relates visual testing to UI testing without causing too much overlap. Hopefully people will realize that not all UI testing is visual testing, but that visual testing is a specialization of UI testing.

Honestly, now that I can no longer find the "ui-testing" tag on this site, I'm reconsidering my tag description edit.

I just feel that visual testing is more explicit and clear, but saying it is also known as "UI testing" makes it a little more ambiguous.

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  • That's a good edit. Thanks for the polish. UI testing would involve input from the UI. Which I don't think should fall under this tag. I like how you make that clear.
    – candied_orange
    Mar 2, 2021 at 9:06

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