Comparing the maintainability of selenium WebDriver test suites employing different locators: a case study

Authors:
Maurizio Leotta;Diego Clerissi;Filippo Ricca;Cristiano Spadaro
Affiliations:
Università di Genova, Italy;Università di Genova, Italy;Università di Genova, Italy;eXact learning solutions, Italy
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2013 International Workshop on Joining AcadeMiA and Industry Contributions to testing Automation
Year:
2013

Citing 5
Cited 0

Testing Processes of Web Applications

Annals of Software Engineering
Observations and lessons learned from automated testing

Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering
Detecting Anomaly and Failure in Web Applications

IEEE MultiMedia
Successful Test Automation for Software Maintenance

ICSM '06 Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
Automated Acceptance Testing: A Literature Review and an Industrial Case Study

AGILE '08 Proceedings of the Agile 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Test suite maintenance tends to have the biggest impact on the overall cost of test automation. Frequently modifications applied on a web application lead to have one or more test cases broken and repairing the test suite is a time-consuming and expensive task. This paper reports on an industrial case study conducted in a small Italian company investigating on the analysis of the effort to repair web test suites implemented using different UI locators (e.g., Identifiers and XPath). The results of our case study indicate that ID locators used in conjunction with LinkText is the best solution among the considered ones in terms of time required (and LOCs to modify) to repair the test suite to the new release of the application.