International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET) e-ISSN: 2395 -0056 Volume: 03 Issue: 11 | Nov -2016 www.irjet.net p-ISSN: 2395-0072 © 2016, IRJET | Impact Factor value: 4.45 | ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal | Page 793 Perceptual Difference for Safer Continuous Delivery Ankit Ramakrishnan, Dr. Manjula R Undergraduate, School of Computer Science and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India Professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India ---------------------------------------------------------------------***--------------------------------------------------------------------- Abstract - Perceptual Difference is a proposed continuous integration tool to enable safer Continuous Delivery. Existing Continuous Delivery tools used for automated testing of Web Applications are inherently dependent on code based testing that uses algorithmic testing and is devoid of human perception. Perceptual Difference combines concepts of Computer Vision and CI to enable recognition of UI/View based changes, assisting human testers to check development branches with added scrutiny before deploying the application. Key Words: Continuous Delivery; Perceptual Difference; Automated Testing 1. INTRODUCTION Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration are common Software Engineering Paradigms used in the Software Industry. They rely on a set of processes and workflows that enable multiple programmers or developers to access the Codebase and submit changes and revisions. Continuous Delivery (CD) is a superset of Continuous Integration (CI). Every change on the Codebase is immediately deployed to production in CD after terse and often very stringent testing and approval mechanism. Most Penultimate processes in CD Involve testing and approval. As a result of CI practices, Testing is majorly automated and requires little to no human intervention. Testing is usually followed by Quality Assurance (QA) which entails approval of the currently staged branch of the Codebase. Perceptual Difference (Perceptual Diff) is intended to reduce this QA time by assisting in identifying changes in the UI. This enables faster and safer CD. The main aim of this methodology is to increase reliability of automated tests. This will greatly increase speed and accuracy of user acceptance tests, thus, resulting in faster deployment rates. Faster release cycles are essential in a market with increasing number of competitive agents that are forever on the lookout for stumbles that a vendor makes in an attempt to gain market share from their competitor’s loss. We shall focus on key aspects of perceptual image difference, CD integrations and other metrics to determine the efficiency of the proposed tool. 2. CONTINUOUS DELIVERY Continuous Delivery as defined by the Agile Alliance is an extension of the Continuous Integration methodology (CI) that tries to reduce the cycle-time (lead time), which is the time taken for a line of code written in development to be used in the live version of a product which is targeted to users. CD methods often involve the creation of Delivery and Deployment Pipelines which are a series of integrations from the point of authoring code to the final deployment to a production environment. These Integrations form the basis for Continuous Integration (CI). In multi author projects that have a large number of developers that have access to the development branch of the project, it is necessary to have integration mechanisms in place such that no single merge can compromise the state of the production branch. Fig-1: Anatomy of the Deployment Pipeline [1][2] 2.1 Continuous Integration CI in the above scenario become absolutely necessary. CI entails that the developers on the developer branch merge their code to the main repository at regular intervals. After merging this code a variety of build and test automation tasks are performed to ensure build integrity. A CI pipeline is usually centrally coordinated with a CI Server. Every revision of the codebase triggers a central build test for that revision. If approved the revision is merged with the staging/production branch. If the tests or the build process