research-article

Meta-heuristic generation of robust XPath locators for web testing

Authors:

Maurizio Leotta,

Andrea Stocco,

Filippo Ricca,

Paolo TonellaAuthors Info & Claims

SBST '15: Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing

Pages 36 - 39

Published: 16 May 2015 Publication History

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Abstract

Test scripts used for web testing rely on DOM locators, often expressed as XPaths, to identify the active web page elements and the web page data to be used in assertions. When the web application evolves, the major cost incurred for the evolution of the test scripts is due to broken locators, which fail to locate the target element in the new version of the software. We formulate the problem of automatically generating robust XPath locators as a graph exploration problem, for which we provide an optimal, greedy algorithm. Since such an algorithm has exponential time and space complexity, we present also a genetic algorithm.

References

[1]

M. Leotta, D. Clerissi, F. Ricca, and P. Tonella. Visual vs. DOM-based web locators: An empirical study. In Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2014), volume 8541 of LNCS, pages 322--340. Springer, 2014.

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[2]

M. Leotta, A. Stocco, F. Ricca, and P. Tonella. Reducing web test cases aging by means of robust XPath locators. In Proceedings of 25th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops, ISSREW 2014, pages 449--454. IEEE, 2014.

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[3]

M. Leotta, A. Stocco, F. Ricca, and P. Tonella. Using multi-locators to increase the robustness of web test cases. In Proceedings of 8th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2015. IEEE, 2015.

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Cited By

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Long ZWu GChen XChen WWei JDevanbu PCohen MZimmermann T(2020)WebRR: self-replay enhanced robust record/replay for web application testingProceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3368089.3417069(1498-1508)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368089.3417069
Cohen MGaleotti JPetke J(2017)The evolutionary landscape of SBSTProceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing10.5555/3105427.3105437(47-48)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3105427.3105437
Leotta MStocco ARicca FTonella P(2016)Robula+Journal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.177128:3(177-204)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/smr.1771

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Meta-heuristic generation of robust XPath locators for web testing

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Information

Published In

SBST '15: Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing

May 2015

68 pages

Program Chairs:
Gregory Gay
University of Minnesota
,
Giuliano Antoniol
École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 16 May 2015

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ICSE '15

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ACM
SIGSOFT
IEEE-CS\DATC
TCSE

ICSE '15: 37th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 16 - 24, 2015

Florence, Italy

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2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

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Long ZWu GChen XChen WWei JDevanbu PCohen MZimmermann T(2020)WebRR: self-replay enhanced robust record/replay for web application testingProceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3368089.3417069(1498-1508)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368089.3417069
Cohen MGaleotti JPetke J(2017)The evolutionary landscape of SBSTProceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing10.5555/3105427.3105437(47-48)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3105427.3105437
Leotta MStocco ARicca FTonella P(2016)Robula+Journal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.177128:3(177-204)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/smr.1771

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Meta-heuristic Generation of Robust XPath Locators for Web Testing

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