By 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.

中文翻译：

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Sidereal：统计自适应生成的健壮定位器，用于Web测试

通过确保足够的功能覆盖范围，端到端（E2E）测试是持续集成的关键推动因素。对于Web应用程序来说更是如此，在Web应用程序中，自动E2E测试是行使用于创建现代应用程序的完整堆栈的唯一方法。用于Web测试的测试代码通常依赖DOM定位器（通常表示为XPath表达式）来标识Web元素并提取断言中检查的数据。当应用程序发展时，测试代码发展的最主要成本是由于定位器损坏，定位器无法在新颖版本中定位目​​标元素，因此必须进行修复。在本文中，我们将健壮的XPath定位器生成问题公式化为图探索问题，而不是依靠临时启发式技术作为最新工具的实现robula +。我们的方法基于工具sidereal实现的统计自适应算法，该算法通过从被测应用程序的先前版本中学习HTML属性的潜在脆弱性，在鲁棒性方面优于robula +的启发式方法。sidereal已应用于六个应用程序，总共应用于611个定位器，并与两种基线算法robula +和Montoto进行了比较。采用sidereal可以大大减少损坏的定位器的数量（分别为-55％和-70％）。生成这种鲁棒定位器的时间被认为是可接受的，大约为百分之一秒。