"This world is such a beautiful place to live in." If you can read the first sentence without any screen readers or assistance, you're privileged. As technologists, shouldn’t we be more empathetic towards differently-abled people and make all parts of our website accessible to them? In my humble opinion, the true power of technology can be identified when it reaches out to people of all kinds having different physical or psychological challenges. We not only legally bound to provide Accessibility but also it should be considered as our moral responsibility.

As testers, we have a wonderful opportunity to contribute to Accessibility by ensuring that the site is accessible in many different ways. Although it is impossible to identify all the issues that exist around Accessibility in the world, we are lucky enough to still understand a majority of them. With this understanding, there have been many measures taken in order to make your site accessible. But, don’t forget - we are QA engineers. We got to ensure that the site is accessible as per the standards set by WCAG 2.0 (AA) by testing for accessibility using various tools and techniques.

I want the site to be tested on Firefox, Chrome, Safari and yes, even IE 11. To add, the site should be responsive and should support mobile and tablet resolutions too. How often do you see this being listed in a Test plan? Almost, all the websites need to supported on multiple browsers and devices, right? Just imagine the manual effort required here. To add, the site is multi-linguistic. Wow, that just doubled all your manual efforts! How about if we automated the visual regression tests too, just the way functional regression tests are? Sounds great, isn't it?

Once you agree with the above paragraph, allow me to explain the concept of automated Visual regression testing, how the visual tools work in general, the concepts around it and the benefits of using them, along with the challenges faced during actual implementation of the tests. There are a couple of tools available in the market, using which you can directly get started with automating your visual tests too.

Even if you have a large QA team, identifying CSS issues on multiple browsers and devices with every build can become a tedious job, erroneous since once cannot capture small pixel differences or even similar color related issues. Therefore, automating them is soon going to be a must have in every Test Plan.

In no time, the term 'Manual QA" is going to be a dinosaur. What does that mean? Are all the Manual QA going to extinct? Thank Behat, Manual testers can have a bright career into Automation. The term automation is itself horrifying, which means complex framework, complex setup and the biggest of all, lots and lots of coding involved.

Behat is an open source BDD PHP framework. It has a rich library of extensions which will help you test user workflow and interact with the Web application using Mink, test your APIs and also develop a Page Object Automation framework.

Do you want to deliver a well-tested website, covering all the test scenarios in every iteration? Excellent, then what is the problem? Oh, too much of manual effort in executing the regression test cases. Well, then automate it. Now, what? Automation, huh, it needs a lot of coding, too much of investment. OK, enough reasons given, the list can go on.

Get started right on with automating your test scenarios with minimal code is what all Behat is about. Behat proved to be extremely useful to me in order to enter the world of automation. After understanding the architecture and its correct usage, my team and me could automate around 70% of the test cases by writing no/minimal PHP code. The lovely features provided by Selenium Webdriver can be easily integrated into Behat with the help of Selenium2Driver which comes out of the box. It is an automation testing framework, coupled with rich libraries in the form of extensions to enable users automate their acceptance tests, API tests and even create a Page Object model when needed. You can execute tests on various browsers or even headless browsers like phantomJS and headless Chrome for faster execution.

Since Behat is built on the lines of Cucumber and promotes BDD, it has proved to be an extremely useful tool to ensure that were are first building the right system followed by the system is being built right. With the help of human readable scenarios written in the feature files, the automation system can be understood by all the three parties - Business people, developers and testers. Gherkin language enables the tester to build more and more strong and a rich Automation test suite than trying to get the code right. composer.json and behat.yml files enable the user to configure stuff in no time.