Understanding and Enhancing Attribute Prioritization in Fixing Web UI Tests with LLMs

The rapid evolution of Web UI incurs time and effort in UI test maintenance. Prior techniques in Web UI test repair focus on locating the target elements on the new Webpage that match the old ones so that the corresponding broken statements can be repaired. These techniques usually rely on prioritizing certain attributes (e.g., XPath) during matching where the similarity of certain attributes is ranked before other attributes, indicating that there may be bias towards certain attributes during matching. To mitigate the bias, we present the first study that investigates the feasibility of using prior Web UI repair techniques for initial matching and then using ChatGPT to perform subsequent matching. Our key insight is that given a list of elements matched by prior techniques, ChatGPT can leverage language understanding to perform subsequent matching and use its code generation model for fixing the broken statements. To mitigate hallucination in ChatGPT, we design an explanation validator that checks if the provided explanation for the matching results is consistent, and provides hints to ChatGPT via a self-correction prompt to further improve its results. Our evaluation on a widely used dataset shows that the ChatGPT-enhanced techniques improve the effectiveness of existing Web test repair techniques. Our study also shares several important insights in improving future Web UI test repair techniques.