Assessor: a PO-Based WebDriver Test Suites Generator from Selenium IDE Recordings

Description

End-to-end automated test scripts are a great way to ensure the quality of web applications, but are often perceived as expensive both during their initial development and subsequent maintenance activities. However, maintenance costs can be reduced when test scripts adopt the Page Object (PO) pattern, a sort of web page facade exposing methods to the test scripts.In this work, we proposed ASSESSOR, a novel tool capable of reducing the effort needed for building PO-based Selenium WebDriver test suites. ASSESSOR allows to simply record the test cases, with only a few additional steps compared to Selenium IDE, and then to automatically generate PO-based WebDriver test suites.The in-depth evaluation performed with four web applications shows that ASSESSOR's adoption allows to reduce the development effort of PO-based web test scripts compared to the classic manual approach: 59% time reduction overall, corresponding to a 2.44 increment in productivity.

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