Towards the Generation of Robust E2E Test Cases in Template-based Web Applications

Capture and Replay techniques provide a well-known solution for End-To-End (E2E) testing of Web applications. They allow a tester to generate test scripts without requiring advanced programming skills. For this reason, they are very popular in acceptance and regression testing activities. These techniques are affected by the issue of fragility of the produced test cases, which may break even if small changes are operated in the user interface, without modifications of the app functionality. To overcome this issue, several approaches for either generating robust test cases or automatically repairing broken test cases have been proposed. In this paper we propose an alternative solution that aims at improving the testability of Web applications for generating robust test cases. This solution applies to Web applications developed with template-based technologies. It is based on the template source code automatic injection of additional hook attributes and on the proposal of a new type of locators based on such hooks. These locators aid the unique retrieval of the user interface items involved in test cases. We validated our technique in the context of a continuous integration and delivery processes of template-based web applications that was developed from scratch. The study showed that the use of hook-based locators can improve the robustness of test cases generated by a Capture & Replay testing tool, introducing relevant savings in the regression test case repairing activity.