Why Creating Web Page Objects Manually If It Can Be Done Automatically?

Page Object is a design pattern aimed at making web test scripts more readable, robust and maintainable. The effort to manually create the page objects needed for a web application may be substantial and unfortunately existing tools do not help web developers in such task. In this paper we present APOGEN, a tool for the automatic generation of page objects for web applications. Our tool automatically derives a testing model by reverse engineering the target web application and uses a combination of dynamic and static analysis to generate Java page objects for the popular Selenium WebDriver framework. Our preliminary evaluation shows that it is possible to use around 3/4 of the automatic page object methods as they are, while the remaining 1/4 need only minor modifications.