AI-Driven Testing

Chapter 3. Automating Graphically Intensive Apps

Recall from Chapter 1 that one of the drawbacks of traditional UI testing tools is the lack of support for automating highly graphical applications. In this chapter, you’ll catch a few glimpses of how AI is pushing test automation into uncharted territories—video streaming and game testing.

AI for Video Stream Testing

Whether watching a movie or show on demand on Netflix, getting live match updates on NBA.com, logging on to a Zoom meeting for work, or playing games via PlayStation Now, people are becoming more and more dependent on video-streaming technologies for business and entertainment. Video streaming is now a core experience in many familiar applications and next-generation gaming systems. Automating the testing of video streams is quite challenging. In this section, you’ll learn about the current state of the practice and then dive into how AI is improving the level of automation.

Video Stream Testing Practices

Best practices for testing video stream quality today involve asking humans to watch videos and rate them using a mean opinion score (MOS). The MOS is a value in the range of 1 to 5, where 1 is the lowest perceived quality and 5 is the highest perceived quality. Not only is this manual approach an expensive and slow way to test video streaming quality, but it doesn’t scale. When network engineers at streaming companies make changes to networks, tweak their decoders, or switch to new devices or carriers, they often ...