Three Open Problems in the Context of E2E Web Testing and a Vision: NEONATE

Ricca, Filippo; Leotta, Maurizio; Stocco, Andrea

doi:10.1016/bs.adcom.2018.10.005

Cited by 14 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Let us consider the following example [18]: a web application composed of two simple web pages: insertInfo.php and showInfo.php. The first page allows users to insert some information about the users in the web application, while the second shows to the user the inserted information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sidereal: Statistical adaptive generation of robust locators for web testing

Leotta

Ricca

Tonella

2021

Software Testing Verif & Rel

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sidereal: Statistical adaptive generation of robust locators for web testing

Leotta

Ricca

Tonella

2021

Software Testing Verif & Rel

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…P esto is a component of NEONATE , an integrated testing environment that, once completed, will be able to empower the Web tester to limit the open problems that in our opinion, hinder the Web test automation: fragility problem, strong coupling and low cohesion problem and incompleteness problem.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is challenging, because such a mapping can be established only dynamically, when the Web application is running, and potentially a single DOM-based locator can have multiple and different visual counterparts.The implementation of our approach, a tool called PESTO, is able to migrate a Selenium WebDriver test suite (second-generation test suite) into a Sikuli API one (third-generation test suite). Using PESTO, companies and professionals can evaluate the features of the third-generation visual testing tools, without taking the risks and the costs of the manual migration.PESTO is a component of NEONATE [9], an integrated testing environment that, once completed, will be able to empower the Web tester to limit the open problems that in our opinion, hinder the Web test automation: fragility problem, strong coupling and low cohesion problem and incompleteness problem.This paper makes the following contributions to the state of the art:• an approach for the automatic creation of visual locators starting from corresponding DOM-based locators. The approach resorts on the automated visual localization of the web elements involved in any interaction or assertion performed by the original DOM-based test suite;• a solution to three challenging problems that must be addressed in order to fully automate the transformation of complex DOM-based test suites to the visual approach and that consists of the generation of visual locators for:1.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Leotta

Stocco

Ricca

et al. 2018

Software Testing Verif & Rel

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Web Test Automation: Insights from the Grey Literature

Ricca

Stocco

2021

SOFSEM 2021: Theory and Practice of Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Three Open Problems in the Context of E2E Web Testing and a Vision: NEONATE

Cited by 14 publications

References 22 publications

Sidereal: Statistical adaptive generation of robust locators for web testing

Sidereal: Statistical adaptive generation of robust locators for web testing

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

Web Test Automation: Insights from the Grey Literature

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About