A Novel Framework for Creating User Interface Level Tests Resistant to Refactoring of Web Applications

Developing user interfaces is an important part of software development process for web-applications. Frequent and small changes are inevitable in the process of developing and refactoring a user interface (UI) to improve user experience while preserving the functionality. Those changes however have been shown to easily break a majority of automated UI-level tests. Maintaining and fixing those test cases then increases the overall cost of development and decreases the benefit of test automation. In this paper, we propose a new test framework for identifying and locating the elements of the UI in a way that cannot be impacted by small UI changes. Our approach is inspired by the way human interact with the UIs of web applications and how such interactions are described and communicated in natural language to others. Our framework could significantly reduce the cost of test maintenance by enabling software engineers create UI-level tests that are naturally resistant to UI changes.