An automated model-based approach to repair test suites of evolving web applications

Abstract

Capture–Replay tools are widely used for the automated testing of web applications The scripts written for these Capture–Replay tools are strongly coupled with the web elements of web applications. These test scripts are sensitive to changes in web elements and require repairs as the web pages evolve. In this paper, we propose an automated model-based approach to repair the Capture–Replay test scripts that are broken due to such changes. Our approach repairs the test scripts that may be broken due to the breakages (e.g., broken locators, missing web elements) reported in the existing test breakage taxonomy. Our approach is based on a DOM-based strategy and is independent of the underlying Capture–Replay tool. We developed a tool to demonstrate the applicability of the approach. We perform an empirical study on seven subject applications. The results show that the approach successfully repairs the broken test scripts while maintaining the same DOM coverage and fault-finding capability. We also evaluate the usefulness of the repaired test scripts according to the opinion of professional testers. We conduct an experiment to compare our approach with the state-of-the-art DOM-based test repair approach, WATER. The comparison results show that our approach repairs more test breakages than WATER.