When a software company realizes its testing needs have outgrown its in-house quality assurance team’s ability to keep up, the first thought is often to hire an outsourced quality assurance provider—such as Applause—to run the company’s entire testing program.

In software testing, smoke tests are a small set of end-to-end tests that make sure the most essential functions of an application or website work properly. Many software teams run a smoke testing suite of 10 to 15 tests as a preliminary step before running an entire regression suite (which could have anywhere from 50 to 500+ tests) to make sure the app is stable enough to merit further testing.

User interface testing (sometimes called graphical user interface testing) involves testing software applications according to what the end user will see on their screen and how they’ll interact with it. For example, can you type in text boxes or click the checkboxes? Are fonts, headers, and other visual elements correct? UI testing can be done manually or with a test automation tool.

The goal of user interface (UI) testing is to verify that: However, most software testing tools either test the appearance of the application or the functionality—few tools do both well. To test functionality, most automated software testing tools primarily interact with the underlying code of an application, while assuming that the visual layer (what the user sees) is rendering properly.

Automating your software tests can speed up testing and provide more reliable test results. For most software teams, automation is necessary to achieve adequate test coverage. If you’re just getting started with automated software testing, you may be overwhelmed by all the options and have a hard time figuring out which tools are right for your team.

Automated visual regression testing tools check for style issues and problems with the visual layer of an app or website. The benefit of these tools is that they can catch issues on the visual layer (the user interface of the website or app, which customers see) that may get missed by test scripts that only interact with the underlying code (the DOM).