What jDiffChaser is

jDiffChaser is a GUI comparison tool that automates differences detection
between same screens of different versions of an application. You can easily record scenarios
(optionally define zones of the screens to ignore during comparisons) and play suites
of them on two different versions of the same Java application (Swing & AWT): differences are
then listed in a web page report.

You can execute scenarios using two modes:
● sequential mode: you have only one test-host, each scenario is executed first
upon the old version of your software then it is executed upon your latest
software version.
● parallel mode: you have two test-hosts, each scenario is executed upon both
versions (old and latest) of your software at the same time. This is useful
when your application uses real time data.

What jDiffChaser is not

jDiffChaser is not a testing tool as it is not able to decide what is correct or
not. There's no assertion handling in it. This software can “just” help you finding
some regression points your eye may have not seen. But in any case you can't only
rely on its results to be sure there's nothing bad in your new release GUI. You still
need to check the results every day, but one thing is sure: jDiffChaser reports
differences with such a highlighting that it speeds a lot this tedious task of visual
checking.

Why this tool?

As a regression support for GUI testing

Many of really good GUI testing tool already exist but many of them can't
“see” the application rendering. For example you can test that a button text is
“Confirm” but you can't test that it is entirely visible. Have you ever had this
“Confi...” label (with the “...” at the end of it) when your JButton is too small to
embed this text value? Have you ever seen the JScrollPane Horizontal scrollbar
appearing because the contained panel was bigger than expected although you
though not?
jDiffChaser also can't detect that something is correctly displayed within a
new application, but as long as you have validated a version with end-users, it can
check that the new version is visually correct, comparing screens between both
releases using the validated one as the reference. That's why jDiffChaser's preferred
action field is regression detection when traditional GUI testing tools are used to test
the new features.

A “hacked” usage: as a feedback tool

Some development teammates sometimes have some difficulties
communicating together :p. Thus some new features implemented by some of the
developers sometimes remain unknown by others. It appeared that jDiffChaser has
filled this communication gap into some teams, highlighting the new features. Some
developers checking the report that was published onto a web server of the company
intranet became aware of those changes. I know that this shouldn't occur in a
development team, but that's a fact, this situation exists in many companies.
jDiffChaser wasn't initially created for this task, but anyway, it seems it helps...