A Clustering Method for Assisting in Tagging Same-Behavior Tested Web Elements

Automated test case generation for web testing has been widely recognized as a difficult task. Even nowadays, web testing still heavily relies on manual efforts for creating test cases. With the rapid development and innovation of web technologies, web applications become more and more complicated, which imposes a heavy burden on testing a large number of interactable web elements. However, despite there are a considerable number of elements on a webpage, many elements are often visually arranged as groups. In some cases, elements within the same group perform the same action (i.e., triggering the same server-side scripts), which means testing on only one element for a group is enough regarding test coverage. In this paper, we present a method for automatically clustering web elements into groups. By applying this method, given a few tested elements, some of the other elements will be automatically identified and highlighted as a group for that element, and then a web tester can tag those elements as ‘tested’ at once if the tester decides they will not contribute to test coverage. In the experimental evaluation, several case studies are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.