An Automatic Approach for Uniquely Discovering Actionable Elements for Systematic GUI Testing in Web Applications

Automated GUI testing can play a crucial role in uncovering faults within web applications. In this context, scriptless testing can streamline the process by automatically generating and executing test cases that explore GUI elements. However, discovering non-repetitive actionable elements within complex web pages remains a challenging task. Often, testers need to employ manual strategies to facilitate element discovery and avoid redundancies. In this paper, we introduce a novel automatic approach, Unique Actionable Element Search (UAES), designed to provide a way to semantically differentiate elements in web applications. By leveraging common HTML properties and semantically expressive locators, UAES streamlines the process of discovering and distinguishing actionable elements, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of systematic GUI testing. We conducted two empirical studies involving four open-source and twenty industrial web applications. They compared the results of our approach to those obtained using explicit markups included by experienced testers. The results indicate that our approach discovered 94.25% of the elements manually identified by the testers, while also uncovering a significant number of elements (46.86% of all elements discovered) that the testers overlooked.