Synthesizing Web Element Locators (T)

Bajaj, Kartik; Pattabiraman, Karthik; Mesbah, Ali

doi:10.1109/ase.2015.23

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Many scenarios involved visual output, raising challenges in how developers might precisely specify the desired output without already writing the code to create it. Tools such as Cassius [31] and LED [28] offer the ability to synthesize styling for element layouts. Tools such Falx [32] and Ivy [33] provide rich direct manipulation of data sources to generate visualizations.…”

Section: Idiomatic Transformationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Barriers in Front-End Web Development

Samudio

LaToza

2022

2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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Developers building web applications constantly face challenges, particularly in working with complex APIs. In response, developers often turn to Stack Overflow, offering a window into the programming barriers developers face. We examined 301 posts on Stack Overflow related to front-end web development and systematically characterized the challenges present in these posts. We found that most challenges reflected not a request for new code or an explanation of an error message but a request about how a specific code snippet might be edited to make its behavior as desired. Many challenges also reflected an underlying need to gather information about how specific code idioms are implemented within a framework or library. We identified 28 barriers developers face in front-end web development. Our findings suggest opportunities for facilitating more effective interactions with complex APIs through new types of programming content and tools that better address barriers in working with code idioms.

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Section: Idiomatic Transformationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Barriers in Front-End Web Development

Samudio

LaToza

2022

2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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“…These clues rely mostly on the content surrounding the element to locate which may be problematic in case the content changes. LED [12] uses a SAT solver to select several elements at once, but is never evaluated on different DOM versions. Finally, some works combine several locator generators with a voting mechanism to locate a single element with more robustness [13,14,15].…”

Section: Generating Web Element Locatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Erratum: Leveraging Flexible Tree Matching to Repair Broken Locators in Web Automation Scripts

Brisset¹,

Rouvoy²,

Seinturier³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Web applications are constantly evolving to integrate new features and fix reported bugs. Even an imperceptible change can sometimes entail significant modifications of the Document Object Model (DOM), which is the underlying model used by browsers to render all the elements included in a web application. Scripts that interact with web applications (e.g. web test scripts, crawlers, or robotic process automation) rely on this continuously evolving DOM which means they are often particularly fragile. More precisely, the major cause of breakages observed in automation scripts are element locators, which are identifiers used by automation scripts to navigate across the DOM. When the DOM evolves, these identifiers tend to break, thus causing the related scripts to no longer locate the intended target elements.For this reason, several contributions explored the idea of automatically repairing broken locators on a page. These works attempt to repair a given broken locator by scanning all elements in the new DOM to find the most similar one. Unfortunately, this approach fails to scale when the complexity of web pages grows, leading either to long computation times or incorrect element repairs. This article, therefore, adopts a different perspective on this problem by introducing a new locator repair solution that leverages tree matching algorithms to relocate broken locators. This solution, named Erratum, implements a holistic approach to reduce the element search space, which greatly eases the locator repair task and drastically improves repair accuracy. We compare the robustness of Erratum on a large-scale benchmark composed of realistic and synthetic mutations applied to popular web applications currently deployed in production. Our empirical results demonstrate that Erratum outperforms the accuracy of WATER, a state-of-the-art solution, by 67%.

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“…In these contexts there have been many proposals aimed at minimizing the user effort needed to identify and annotate informative examples, e.g., Zhang (2008); Dalvi et al (2016); Budlong et al (2013); Bajaj et al (2015). Some proposals advocated the execution of an initial, fully unsupervised analysis of the data corpus followed by some explicit instructions from the user on how to proceed with the processing of, e.g., logs (Fisher et al, 2008), collections of facts (Etzioni et al, 2005), or relations (Yates et al, 2007).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%