NLP-assisted Web Element Identification Toward Script-free Testing

End-to-end test automation is important in modern web application development. However, existing test automation techniques have challenges in implementing and maintaining test scripts. It is difficult to keep correct locators, which test scripts require to identify web elements on web pages. The reason is that locators depend on the metadata in web elements or the structure of each web page. One efficient way to solve the problem of locators is to make test cases written in natural language executable without test scripts. As the first step of script-free testing, we propose a technique to identify web elements to be operated and to determine test procedures by interpreting test cases. The test cases are written in a domain-specific language without relying on the metadata of web elements or the structural information of web pages. We leverage natural language processing techniques to understand the semantics of web elements. We also create heuristic search algorithms to find promising test procedures. To evaluate our proposed technique, we applied it to two open-source web applications. The experimental results show that our technique successfully identified 94% of web elements to be operated in the test cases.