COLOR: Correct Locator Recommender for Broken Test Scripts using Various Clues in Web Application

Test automation tools such as Selenium are commonly used for automating end-to-end tests, but when developers update the software, they often need to modify the test scripts accordingly. However, the costs of modifying these test scripts are a big obstacle to test automation because of the scripts’ fragility. In particular, locators in test scripts are prone to change. Some prior methods tried to repair broken locators by using structural clues, but these approaches usually cannot handle radical changes to page layouts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called COLOR (correct locator recommender) to support repairing broken locators in accordance with software updates. COLOR uses various properties as clues obtained from screens (i.e., attributes, texts, images, and positions). We examined which properties are reliable for recommending locators by examining changes between two release versions of software, and the reliability is adopted as the weight of a property. Our experimental results obtained from four open source web applications show that COLOR can present the correct locator in first place with a 77% – 93% accuracy and is more robust against page layout changes than structure-based approaches.