Meta-heuristic generation of robust XPath locators for web testing

Abstract

Test scripts used for web testing rely on DOM locators, often expressed as XPaths, to identify the active web page elements and the web page data to be used in assertions. When the web application evolves, the major cost incurred for the evolution of the test scripts is due to broken locators, which fail to locate the target element in the new version of the software. We formulate the problem of automatically generating robust XPath locators as a graph exploration problem, for which we provide an optimal, greedy algorithm. Since such an algorithm has exponential time and space complexity, we present also a genetic algorithm.