Visual Regression Testing

Quick Guide: A visual test asserts that a subject still looks the way a human approved it. The comparison is trivial; everything hard surrounds it — making the render deterministic, scoping the capture to the subject, generating baselines in the environment that will diff them, and looking at every diff before accepting a new one. A baseline accepted without being looked at turns the suite into a machine that asserts the bug.

Detailed Resources:

• examples/core.md — comparison configuration, the baseline matrix, masking, subject scoping
• examples/determinism.md — the stabilizing stylesheet, fonts, frozen clocks, seeded randomness, fixture data, environment parity
• examples/catalog-driven.md — a component-state catalog as the visual corpus, modes, interaction-produced states, change detection
• examples/ci.md — pipeline wiring, diff artifacts, the baseline-refresh workflow, cost control
• reference.md — comparison-option semantics, update modes, the pre-commit checklist, troubleshooting table

Which path applies

The two families differ in where the baseline lives, who accepts a change, and who owns the render environment. Pick before writing anything; retrofitting is a migration rather than a flag.