Web Automation Research Articles

Mastering Dynamic Web Element Handling and Locator Strategies in Selenium

Web automation testing is essential for ensuring software quality and delivering seamless user experiences. Selenium, a leading automation tool, empowers testers to create robust scripts for handling diverse and dynamic web applications. However, challenges such as identifying dynamic web elements and crafting effective locator strategies require advanced techniques. This article explores key solutions, including the use of relative locators, dynamic XPath expressions, and custom attributes for stable element identification. It also highlights the importance of employing the Page Object Model (POM) framework to enhance script maintainability and scalability while addressing dynamic element challenges. Strategies like explicit waits, retry mechanisms, and modular frameworks are discussed to improve test reliability and minimize failures. By adopting these approaches, testers can overcome the complexities of modern web applications, streamline test automation processes, and ensure the accuracy and resilience of their scripts. This enables faster testing cycles and contributes to delivering high-quality software in dynamic environments. Keywords: Web Automation Testing, Selenium, Dynamic Web Elements, Locator Strategies, Relative Locators, Dynamic XPath, Page Object Model (POM), Custom Attributes, Test Automation Framework, Script Maintainability.

Efficient Bottom-Up Synthesis for Programs with Local Variables

We propose a new synthesis algorithm that can efficiently search programs with local variables (e.g., those introduced by lambdas). Prior bottom-up synthesis algorithms are not able to evaluate programs with free local variables, and therefore cannot effectively reduce the search space of such programs (e.g., using standard observational equivalence reduction techniques), making synthesis slow. Our algorithm can reduce the space of programs with local variables. The key idea, dubbed lifted interpretation, is to lift up the program interpretation process, from evaluating one program at a time to simultaneously evaluating all programs from a grammar. Lifted interpretation provides a mechanism to systematically enumerate all binding contexts for local variables, thereby enabling us to evaluate and reduce the space of programs with local variables. Our ideas are instantiated in the domain of web automation. The resulting tool, Arborist, can automate a significantly broader range of challenging tasks more efficiently than state-of-the-art techniques including WebRobot and Helena.

Automated Attendance using Face Recognition and Automated Marking in ERP System

Abstract: Every institution like educational institutions, government agencies, or private businesses needs to control attendance. Institutions will need to keep track of individuals within the organization, such as employees and students, in order to maximize their performance. Facial Recognition in Real-time is a practical method for managing the daily attendance of several students. Our program is focused mainly on implementing Web automation for all the institutions which use Web app ERP (Enterprise resource planning) or like ERP system for marking the attendance. Our model automates the complete task from taking attendance, logging in into ERP , marking attendance in ERP / similar web app with an acknowledgement email regarding the attendance status to each student/ user. Also creating Database of attendance of each session. Which is implemented in python using OpenCV, Selenium, smptlib and MongoDB.

Erratum: Leveraging Flexible Tree Matching to repair broken locators in web automation scripts

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.

Automated E-Commerce and Web Automation using Puppeteer

Automation replaces human work in repetitive, tedious tasks, and minimizes the quantity of errors. With the correct automation tools, it's possible to automate browser tasks, web testing, and online data extraction, to fill forms, scrape data, transfer data between applications, and generate reports. In this paper we will discuss about Automated E-Commerce website. The research project focuses on automating the task of placing an order of particular set of items from an online website. The idea is to save time and effort of the user by automating every task from signing in to adding products to the cart and filling up all the forms and placing order. The project also aims at providing the user a Real Time notification through mail for any Price Drops for a particular product that the user wishes to buy in future. Therefore, it also acts as a Price Monitoring System. There are various automation tools out of which we will discuss about Puppeteer.

Impact of Unit Testing in Web Automation Testing

The main intent of performing Software testing is to see that the software system is working as per the user’s requirements. Unit testing is done at the individual unit or at the components level. The main objective of this testing is to validate and ensure that each unit is performing its required function effectively. In case of automated testing, in recent days, many testing tools are available which help developers to perform unit testing in a simpler manner. This paper shows how automated unit testing is performed using different testing tools like JUnit, Selenium with web driver Java and Selenium with python. Regarding the experimental work, different applications were tested with the automated tools and results have been discussed with its code. To ensure reliability on web testing, the application has to be tested with the most suitable test case. With Selenium web driver concept, various User Interfaces are identified with xpath and CSS concept and test scripts ensure that various inputs are navigated between User Interface elements. The Automated software testing process reduces time and makes it more accurate.

Auto-Suggesting Browsing Actions for Personalized Web Screen Reading.

Web browsing has never been easy for blind people, primarily due to the serial press-and-listen interaction mode of screen readers - their "go-to" assistive technology. Even simple navigational browsing actions on a page require a multitude of shortcuts. Auto-suggesting the next browsing action has the potential to assist blind users in swiftly completing various tasks with minimal effort. Extant auto-suggest feature in web pages is limited to filling form fields; in this paper, we generalize it to any web screen-reading browsing action, e.g., navigation, selection, etc. Towards that, we introduce SuggestOmatic, a personalized and scalable unsupervised approach for predicting the most likely next browsing action of the user, and proactively suggesting it to the user so that the user can avoid pressing a lot of shortcuts to complete that action. SuggestOmatic rests on two key ideas. First, it exploits the user's Action History to identify and suggest a small set of browsing actions that will, with high likelihood, contain an action which the user will want to do next, and the chosen action is executed automatically. Second, the Action History is represented as an abstract temporal sequence of operations over semantic web entities called Logical Segments - a collection of related HTML elements, e.g., widgets, search results, menus, forms, etc.; this semantics-based abstract representation of browsing actions in the Action History makes SuggestOmatic scalable across websites, i.e., actions recorded in one website can be used to make suggestions for other similar websites. We also describe an interface that uses an off-the-shelf physical Dial as an input device that enables SuggestOmatic to work with any screen reader. The results of a user study with 12 blind participants indicate that SuggestOmatic can significantly reduce the browsing task times by as much as 29% when compared with a hand-crafted macro-based web automation solution.

Web automation for power mech systems

Web automation for power mech systems

Ringer: web automation by demonstration

With increasing amounts of data available on the web and a diverse range of users interested in programmatically accessing that data, web automation must become easier. Automation helps users complete many tedious interactions, such as scraping data, completing forms, or transferring data between websites. However, writing web automation scripts typically requires an expert programmer because the writer must be able to reverse engineer the target webpage. We have built a record and replay tool, Ringer, that makes web automation accessible to non-coders. Ringer takes a user demonstration as input and creates a script that interacts with the page as a user would. This approach makes Ringer scripts more robust to webpage changes because user-facing interfaces remain relatively stable compared to the underlying webpage implementations. We evaluated our approach on benchmarks recorded on real webpages and found that it replayed 4x more benchmarks than a state-of-the-art replay tool.

Towards a Rule-based Manufacturing Integration Assistant

Recent developments and steadily declining prices in ICT enable an economic application of advanced digital tools in wide areas of manufacturing. Solutions based on concepts and technologies of the “Internet of Things” or “cyber physical systems” can be used to implement monitoring as well as self-organization of production, maintenance or logistics processes. However, integration of new digital tools in existing heterogeneous manufacturing IT systems and integration of machines and devices into manufacturing environments is an expensive and tedious task. Therefore, integration issues on IT and manufacturing level significantly prevent agile manufacturing. Especially small and medium-sized enterprises do not have the expertise or the investment possibilities to realize such an integration. To tackle this issue, we present the approach of the Manufacturing Integration Assistant - MIALinx. The objective is to develop and implement a lightweight and easy-to-use integration solution for small and medium-sized enterprises based on recent web automation technologies. MIALinx aims to simplify the integration using simple programmable, flexible and reusable “IF-THEN” rules that connect occurring situations in manufacturing, such as a machine break down, with corresponding actions, e.g., an automatic maintenance order generation. For this purpose, MIALinx connects sensors and actuators based on defined rules whereas the rule set is defined in a domain-specific, easy-to-use manner to enable rule modeling by domain experts. Through the definition of rule sets, the workers’ knowledge can be also externalized. Using manufacturing-approved cloud computing technologies, we enable robustness, security, and a low-effort, low-cost integration of MIALinx into existing manufacturing environments to provide advanced digital tools also for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Improved Quality and Reliability in Telecommunication Network Testing by means of a Remote Online Test System

Increasing demand for high quality and reliable operation of the telecommunication network services and its applications have been the main challenges of the telecommunication network providers in the last decade. In this paper, a remote online testing facility (Intact – Intelligent Test Automation and Configuration Tool) is introduced that proposes a solution for telecommunication network providers to meet demands and to ensure business services as well as network related services (circuit switched and packet switched) operate efficiently.
 This paper presents a particular solution of remote testing based on the automated functional “End to End” testing approach. “End to End” starts by configuring service properties, subscriber record and service logic on one hand. On the other hand several hundred call scenarios can be executed fully automatically. Moreover the call detail records written by the network elements are verified automatically too. Hence a test description and web automation language was developed which is very easy to learn. This testing approach improves test speed and quality leading to reduced risk and investment on test procedure. As a result, the proposed solution of a remote automated online test system aims to overcome higher cost, longer time to market periods and increased effort in testing.

Efficient execution of web navigation sequences

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration and automated testing of web applications. Most current systems build the automatic web navigation component by using the APIs of conventional browsers. While this approach has its advantages, it suffers performance problems for intensive web automation tasks which require real time responses and/or a high degree of parallelism. In this paper, we outline a set of techniques to build a web navigation component able to efficiently execute web navigation sequences. These techniques detect what elements and scripts of the pages accessed during the navigation sequence are needed for the correct execution of the sequence (and, therefore, must be loaded and executed), and what parts of the pages can be discarded. The tests executed with real web sources show that the optimized navigation sequences run significantly faster and consume significantly less resources.

Study of Automated Social Engineering, its Vulnerabilities, Threats and Suggested Countermeasures

Social Engineering (ASE) is how social networking sites (SNSs) are exploited for Social Engineering by automated bots. Classical social engineering is an attack on the security of systems, based on exploiting human factors. ASE is an automated form of traditional social engineering which makes use of bots to attack SNS. One such bot is KOOBFACE (1) that infected Facebook for a long time until it was detected in mid of 2011 by Sophos lab. ASE bots can be developed easily using open source web automation and web scrapping tools. These tools combined with appropriate chat logic with enhanced intelligence pose a great threat to the security of SNSs. Countermeasures like Captchas have proved ineffective in preventing bots from infiltrating SNS's. New techniques like Multi Modal Captchas (MMC), and Fast Flux Network (FFN) detection are the future of the ASE prevention. In this paper we present a survey of vulnerabilities, threats and propose some countermeasures for Automated Social Engineering.

OXPath

The evolution of the web has outpaced itself: The growing wealth of information and the increasing sophistication of interfaces necessitate automated processing. Web automation and extraction technologies have been overwhelmed by this very growth. To address this trend, we identify four key requirements of web extraction: (1) Interact with sophisticated web application interfaces, (2) Precisely capture the relevant data for most web extraction tasks, (3) Scale with the number of visited pages, and (4) Readily embed into existing web technologies. We introduce OXPath, an extension of XPath for interacting with web applications and for extracting information thus revealed. It addresses all the above requirements. OXPath's page-at-a-time evaluation guarantees memory use independent of the number of visited pages, yet remains polynomial in time. We validate experimentally the theoretical complexity and demonstrate that its evaluation is dominated by the page rendering of the underlying browser. Our experiments show that OXPath outperforms existing commercial and academic data extraction tools by a wide margin. OX-Path is available under an open source license.

Exploiting multidimensional data for web site automation

The continuous growth in size and usage of the World Wide Web poses a number of challenging research problems. This thesis investigates the use of multidimensional data to automate the personalization and management activities of web sites. We pay particular attention to the use of additional dimensions (e.g., contextual or background information) in traditional user-item based top-N recommender systems and propose a multidimensional approach for this purpose. To support our research, we also propose a data warehouse to collect and compile information regarding the activity on a web site in terms of usage, content and structure. We show that, by exploiting multidimensional data, efficient web automation methods can be developed and used to improve the personalization and management of web sites.

Automated browsing in AJAX websites

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration, automated testing of web applications or technology and business watch. One crucial part in web automation applications is for them to easily generate and reproduce navigation sequences. This problem is specially complicated in the case of the new breed of AJAX-based websites. Although recently some tools have also addressed the problem, they show some limitations either in usability or their ability to deal with complex websites. In this paper, we propose a set of new techniques to build an automatic web navigation system able to deal with these complexities. Our main contributions are: a new method for recording navigation sequences able to scale to a wider range of events, an algorithm to identify in a change-resilient manner the target element of a user action, and a novel method to detect when the effects caused by a user action (including the effects of scripting code and AJAX requests) have finished. In addition, we have also tested our approach with a high number of real web sources and have compared it with other relevant web automation tools obtaining very good results.

Managing knowledge on the Web – Extracting ontology from HTML Web

In recent years, the Internet has become one of the most important sources of information, and it is now imperative that companies are able to collect, retrieve, process, and manage information from the Web. However, due to the sheer amount of information available, browsing web content by searches using keywords is inefficient, largely because unstructured HTML web pages are written for human comprehension and not for direct machine processing. For the same reason, the degree of web automation is limited. It is recognized that semantics can enhance web automation, but it will take an indefinite amount of effort to convert the current HTML Web into the Semantic Web. This study proposes a novel ontology extractor, called OntoSpider, for extracting ontology from the HTML Web. The contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a six-phase process that includes the preparation, transformation, clustering, recognition, refinement, and revision for extracting ontology from unstructured HTML pages. The extracted ontology provides structured and relevant information for applications such as e-commerce and knowledge management that can be compared and analyzed more effectively. We give detailed information on the system and provide a series of experimental results that validate the system design and illustrate the effectiveness of OntoSpider.

Algorithmic Design Using Object-Z for Twig XML Queries Evaluation

Web technologies based on XML, e.g. Semantic Web and Web Services, facilitate Web automation and universally accessible content. One of the key factors for the success of XML-based technologies is of finding an efficient query evaluation algorithm for XML-based data models. An XML twig query is a complex selection predicate on both structure and content of a labelled XML document. Several novel twig query evaluation algorithms have been proposed recently. However, these algorithms are difficult to understand and hence implement due to high complexity. In this work, we present an algorithmic design for XML queries evaluation system using Object-Z. An Object-Z specification is developed to give a concise and logical description of the XML data model and the twig queries. It makes the twig query evaluation straight-forward, and allows different evaluation algorithms to be constructed easily and independently.

Naming page elements in end-user web automation

The names of commands and objects are vital to the usability of a programming system. We are developing a web automation system in which users need to identify web page elements, such as hyperlinks and form fields, in pages written by other designers. Using a survey of 40 users asking them to provide names for page elements, we found that users' names varied widely. However, when names were restricted to using only visible words from the web page. we were able to develop name resolution techniques that automatically find the desired page element given the user's name for it, striking a balance between usability and the precision required by the programming system.