Hackathon! 500 Engineers. 100 Winners. Over $40,000 in Prizes.
Tags: devops, webdev, uiweekly, testing
Published: 2019-11-07 19:01:07

As a test engineer, you have to write, run, and maintain a bunch of tests for your applications. Are you a rockstar engineer? Do you stand out from your peers?

We know what can make you stand out. And, we have over $40,000 USD in prizes, including two $5,000 Diamond Prizes we are waiting to share with you and a few of your engineering colleagues who are willing to spend a few hours trying something that can change your career. Interested? Apply now to join the fun! Or, read on to find out more.

By the way, here are the prizes you could win:
![Alt Text](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ngci68d6ndo0n10qku4a.png)

**What Skills Separate Rockstars from Everyone Else?**

Test automation rockstars have a unique set of capabilities that make them incredibly valuable. Among these are:

- *Speed* – a rockstar engineer can write and maintain tests more quickly than their peers.
- *Coverage* – a rockstar engineer can ensure that his or her tests cover all visual artifacts.
- *Efficiency* – a rockstar engineer can write the minimum amount of code to ensure coverage.
- *Accuracy* – a rockstar engineer can identify real issues and their root cause.
- *Breadth* – a rockstar engineer can run all the testing needed across devices, operating systems, browsers, and viewport sizes.
- *Teamwork* – a rockstar engineer can let the appropriate team member know that they have discovered a defect that needs repair.

Rockstar engineers get more effective coverage than their peers. They test more, faster. They catch and help fix bugs early in the dev cycle. They keep up with the demands of continuous delivery environments. They can manage the comprehensive testing needed for CSS changes.

**How Does Someone Become A Test Automation Rockstar?**
Mad skills are part of it, but a test automation rockstar also has better technology than an ordinary test engineer. One key capability lets engineers automate visual rendering of entire pages and other visual images, including PDFs.  These rockstars have gotten hold of and deployed a solution using Visual AI into their test processes. Visual AI uses computer vision to recognize and identify meaningful, significant differences between previously-validated baselines and the current run of an application.

Rockstars use Visual AI to monitor functional tests, identify new behavior, and either accept it as designed or reject it as an error. For accepted behavior, rockstars incorporate the change to their baseline with one click. For errors, rockstars inform the development team of the offending code and it’s corresponding PR. Boom! Bug fixed in minutes instead of hours or even days.

**Visual AI – The Secret Sauce**
Pixel-level rendering differences can cause other technologies to report errors, even though a user would not notice them as differences. You might have used other visual test technologies. You might have gotten frustrated with the number of false-positive errors you had to investigate. If so, you likely have joined others who have abandoned those technologies – and any hope of visual testing.

Unfortunately, without any form of visual testing, test engineers fall back to functional testing by inspecting output HTML for specific elements that appear in the correct behavior of a web page. If a visual element has no specific check, it isn’t checked. And, the HTML inspection does not, generally, comment on how the browser has rendered the page – so a page can pass a text inspection and still fail from a user’s perspective.

Visual AI makes visual testing a reality – both for checking the rendering of an individual web page as well as automating functional testing of web applications. Visual AI makes it easy to snapshot a given page at the end of some testing behavior and compare the output to the baseline. If the page doesn’t match what a user would see in the baseline, Visual AI flags the individual differences and lets the test automation rockstar determine the next steps.

**What Is The Test Automation Rockstar Challenge?**
Applitools is giving away over $40,000 in prizes to engineers who show they know how to use Visual AI to become Test Automation Rockstars. We think this gives you an incentive to take some free time and try new technology, not to mention the value of upskilling on the use of Visual AI.

To get started, follow the simple get-up-to-speed process we have set up for you:

1) *Sign up for the challenge*
2) *Sign up for a free Applitools account to use for the challenge.*
3) *Take a free course on Test Automation University to give you an overview of Visual AI and its benefit to you in testing.*
4) *Get access to your own instance of a demonstration application.*
5) *Validate the existing tests for the demonstration application.*
6) *Add Applitools to the demo app.*
7) *Check out what Visual AI gives you, including new workflows, improved coverage, and easier way of creating, maintaining, and running tests.*
8) *Submit your results.*

Individuals who complete the challenge and submit their results can win one of the cash prizes Applitools is offering. And, we’ll let the world know you are a rockstar.

**Why Is Applitools Doing This Contest?**
We think this is a win-win. We want engineers to get better results and we want you to put Visual AI to the test.

As someone with a critical job for your organization, you have lots of ways to spend your time. And if you’re like most test engineers, you guard your free time (as it can slip away during an outage or other app issue). So, if someone says, “Invest in us!”, it’s not unreasonable for you to ask, “what’s in it for me?”

So, we have started this contest to give you an incentive to spend your free time trying our solution and learning along the way.

**How Do I Join The Applitools Visual AI Automation Rockstar Contest?**
This sounds great, right? So, how do you join the contest?

You can check out the [hackathon contest overview page](https://applitools.com/hackathon). It gives you details about the contest, the prizes, and what it takes to join the hackathon.

You can check out the [technical details](https://applitools.com/hackathon-instructions) about the hackathon.

Or, you can just [sign up here](http://go.applitools.com/hackathon-apply)!

Once you sign up, you’ll be guided to set up an Applitools instance and run through all the test steps. Once you’ve done the work, submit your results and be part of a contest that could net you as much as $5,000.