A Gaming Quest to Improve Web Locators Robustness

Web applications have become fundamental to our lives, thus testing methods ensuring their quality are essential. Usually, Web test automation frameworks and tools use locators to interact with the GUI, serving as hooks to the widgets within Web pages. However, locators are known to be one of the most significant points of fragility in Web testing, due to their susceptibility to rapid software evolution impacting the Web pages structure. While gamification strategies have been recently incorporated into the Web testing process to increase testers engagement, by means of tasks and rewards tailored around test activities, they have not yet been applied to locators robustness. In this paper, we introduce TestQuest, a tool under development that adapts gamification to improve locators robustness, by employing evaluation metrics and best practices designed to make testing via locators more engaging for testers, potentially enhancing the overall test quality.