Water

Stocco

J. Softw. Evol. and Proc.

et al. 2016

Automated test scripts are used with success in many web development projects, so as to automatically verify key functionalities of the web application under test, reveal possible regressions and run a large number of tests in short time. However, the adoption of automated web testing brings advantages but also novel problems, among which the test code fragility problem. During the evolution of the web application, existing test code may easily break and testers have to correct it. In the context of automated DOM-based web testing, one of the major costs for evolving the test code is the manual effort necessary to repair broken web page element locators -lines of source code identifying the web elements (e.g. form fields and buttons) to interact with.In this work, we present ROBULA+, a novel algorithm able to generate robust XPath-based locatorslocators that are likely to work correctly on new releases of the web application. We compared ROBULA+ with several state of the practice/art XPath locator generator tools/algorithms. Results show that XPath locators produced by ROBULA+ are by far the most robust. Indeed, ROBULA+ reduces the locators' fragility on average by 90% w.r.t. absolute locators and by 63% w.r.t. Selenium IDE locators.

“…Indeed, automatic evolution of test suites is far from being consolidated even if some preliminary approaches have been proposed (e.g. [12,13]).…”

Section: Evolution Of Web Test Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Test Maintenance and Test Automationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Robula+: an algorithm for generating robust XPath locators for web testing

Stocco

J. Softw. Evol. and Proc.

et al. 2016

“…An approach complementary to the generation of robust locators is the automatic repair of broken locators and more generally of test cases. This approach has been investigated by various researchers [27‐29] and shares the same goal with ours: reducing the overall test suite maintenance activity.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sidereal: Statistical adaptive generation of robust locators for web testing

Software Testing Verif & Rel

Tonella

2021

SummaryBy ensuring adequate functional coverage, End‐to‐End (E2E) testing is a key enabling factor of continuous integration. This is even more true for web applications, where automated E2E testing is the only way to exercise the full stack used to create a modern application. The test code used for web testing usually relies on DOM locators, often expressed as XPath expressions, to identify the web elements and to extract the data checked in assertions. When applications evolve, the most dominant cost for the evolution of test code is due to broken locators, which fail to locate the target element in the novel versions and must be repaired. In this paper, we formulate the robust XPath locator generation problem as a graph exploration problem, instead of relying on ad‐hoc heuristics as the one implemented by the state of the art tool robula+. Our approach is based on a statistical adaptive algorithm implemented by the tool sidereal, which outperforms robula+'s heuristics in terms of robustness by learning the potential fragility of HTML properties from previous versions of the application under test. sidereal was applied to six applications and to a total of 611 locators and was compared against two baseline algorithms, robula+ and Montoto. The adoption of sidereal results in a significant reduction of the number of broken locators (respectively ‐55% and ‐70%). The time for generating such robust locators was deemed acceptable being in the order of hundredths of second.

“…The problem of automatically supporting maintenance of test suites for Web applications has been studied from different points of view [33,34,35], including refactoring techniques applied in the industry [36,37], Web re-engineering and testing [38,39,40,41,42], refactoring of test code [43,44,45,46], and GUI testing and refactoring [8,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56]. Nevertheless, none of these works specifically addresses the problem of the automated migration of DOM-based Web test suites to the visual approach.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pesto: Automated migration of DOM‐based Web tests towards the visual approach

Stocco

Software Testing Verif & Rel

et al. 2018

Summary Test automation tools are widely adopted for testing complex Web applications. Three generations of tools exist: first, based on screen coordinates; second, based on DOM–based commands; and third, based on visual image recognition. In our previous work, we proposed Pesto, a tool able to migrate second‐generation Selenium WebDriver test suites towards third‐generation Sikuli ones. In this work, we extend Pesto to manage Web elements having (1) complex visual interactions and (2) multiple visual appearances. Pesto relies on aspect‐oriented programming, computer vision, and code transformations. Our new improved tool has been evaluated on two Web test suites developed by an independent tester. Experimental results show that Pesto manages and transforms correctly test suites with Web elements having complex visual interactions and multistate elements. By using Pesto, the migration of existing DOM–based test suites to the visual approach requires a low manual effort, since our approach proved to be very accurate.