A New Algorithm for Repairing Web-Locators using Optimization Techniques

The importance of test automation in the software industry has received a growing attention in recent years and it is continuously increasing. Unfortunately, the maintenance of the test cases is a major problem that faces those who use test automation. This problem becomes bigger when dealing with Graphical User Interface (GUI) tests. In this paper, an algorithm is introduced to maintain GUI tests for web applications. The Genetic algorithm is adopted to automatically repair the locators used to select elements from web pages. The algorithm is evaluated using several applications and results show that the proposed algorithm improves the repair percentage to 87% of the used locators compared to the previous result which was 73%.