Assessor: a PO-Based WebDriver Test Suites Generator from Selenium IDE Recordings

End-to-end automated test scripts are a great way to ensure the quality of web applications, but are often perceived as expensive both during their initial development and subsequent maintenance activities. However, maintenance costs can be re-duced when test scripts adopt the Page Object (PO) pattern, a sort of web page facade exposing methods to the test scripts. In this work, we proposed ASSESSOR, a novel tool capable of reducing the effort needed for building PO-based Selenium WebDriver test suites. ASSESSOR allows to simply record the test cases, with only a few additional steps compared to Selenium IDE, and then to automatically generate PO-based WebDriver test suites. The in-depth evaluation performed with four web applications shows that ASSESSOR's adoption allows to reduce the development effort of PO-based web test scripts compared to the classic manual approach: 59% time reduction overall, corresponding to a 2.44 increment in productivity.