Web testware evolution

Web applications evolve at a very fast rate, to accommodate new functionalities, presentation styles and interaction modes. The test artefacts developed during web testing must be evolved accordingly. Among the other causes, one critical reason why test cases need maintenance during web evolution is that the locators used to uniquely identify the page elements under test may fail or may behave incorrectly. The robustness of web page locators used in test cases is thus critical to reduce the test maintenance effort. We present an algorithm that generates robust web page locators for the elements under test and we describe the design of an empirical study that we plan to execute to validate such robust locators.