Announcing Touca v2.0

We are excited to announce the release of Touca 2.0, the result of months of engineering work based on feedback from hundreds of users.

To celebrate this milestone, we're live on Product Hunt today. We'd love to have your support and hear your feedback.

Touca gives engineering teams confidence in new versions of their product. We help developers see how their day-to-day code changes affect the behavior and performance of their software.

Today, most engineering teams have to suffer through long QA feedback cycles or resort to writing hard-to-maintain unit tests and integration tests. Sadly, for most types of software, writing reliable, automated, and developer-friendly tests is still very difficult.

Touca lets you describe the behavior and performance of any version of your software for any number of inputs. Touca automatically compares your description against a previous baseline version and reports any differences. It provides a collaborative platform for you and your team to gain insights about how your software evolves over time and resolve regressions during the development stage before they become costly.

🌠 Touca is a superior alternative to snapshot testing.

Snapshot testing is a type of testing that involves capturing the current state of a software workflow, and comparing it to a previously saved "snapshot" file to ensure that the component has not changed in an unexpected way. This can be useful for detecting changes that might indicate a bug or other problem, such as changes in the layout or styling of a user interface component. The snapshot files are typically stored alongside the test code, and are updated whenever the test is run and the component's behavior changes in an expected way.

Most snapshot testing libraries leave the comparison and management of these files to software engineers. Managing result files for hundreds of test cases is not feasible at scale. Touca stores test results in a remote server to remove the need for managing snapshot files. It automatically compares test results against your baseline version and reports differences in an easy-to-understand format so that engineers only need to decide what to do with those differences.

🌠 Touca provides the test infrastructure you don't need to build.

Touca SDKs help developers write high-level tests to find regressions in complex workflows by tracking changes in how your software handles various inputs.

Unlike unit testing, Touca tests do not use expected values. Instead of writing assertions for each test input, you only write a single block of code to describe your high-level workflow and specify the data points you would like Touca to track. This approach helps you scale the number of your test inputs without increasing the maintenance cost of your test code.

Every software has unique characteristics and requirements. But the custom tooling and test infrastructure that teams build in-house are often very similar and always more expensive and difficult to get right than you think.

🌠 Touca is a shift-left testing solution for developers.

Traditional software test automation tools are designed for use by QA engineers. They provide a user experience that is foreign to developers. They are difficult to maintain and they introduce long feedback cycles that hinder developer productivity.

Touca is optimized for developer experience. It gives fast continuous feedback to software engineers when they need it. We give developers options to integrate Touca with their workflow however works best for them:

Use our CLI to check your workflow for regressions as you perform refactoring and rewrites. Integrate with your CI to get feedback on each code change or pull request. Or use our self-hosted test runner to continuously test your complex data-intensive workflows on a dedicated server.

🌠 Touca shows you how your software evolves over time.

For most engineering teams software testing is reduced to a green check mark; a mandatory step of the software release cycle that feels too mechanical for developers to own. For most businesses, testing is an afterthought.

Touca makes testing an ever-present part of the development stage. It shows you how the behavior and performance of your software changes across different versions. It reports mishandled corner cases, identifies flaky tests, and flags performance spikes, to provide insights that go beyond a green check mark.

🌠 Touca is GitHub for your test results.

Touca server gives shared access to your test results, giving you and your team an up-to-date understanding of how new versions of your software behave and perform across a variety of input scenarios.

We help you collaborate with your team members in inspecting and interpreting new differences, communicate your investigation results by leaving notes and comments, and take action as a team by approving differences or claiming responsibility for them. Building software is team work. Testing software should be no different.

If you like what we are building, give our repository a star on GitHub.