Adam Sandman & Denis Markovtsev

Inflectra

As a research project to see why test automation of web applications is so hard, and why our Selenium scripts seem to break so frequently, Adam and Denis ran an experiment to analyse the top 500 (ranked by Moz) web sites to see what patterns we would find that could be optimized to reduce test maintenance burden.

Unlike other presentation technologies, web applications present a uniquely difficult challenge for automation. They are written in a plain text markup language (HTML) that follows many conventions and rules (e.g. unique IDs, use class names for styling), but browsers are so forgiving, that many of the rules are ignored since they are not enforced in any way. This causes a huge challenge for automation because the developers of the apps often use frameworks that make it hard for automated test scripts to reliably locate elements and perform user actions.

In this talk Adam and Denis will present some background on the problem, then detail their findings from the research experiment where we analysed the top 500 websites by downloading their DOM trees and performing data analysis to see how best practices developed in theory will work in practices with these sites. The talk provides suggestions and ideas derived from the data about how we can create more reliable tests. It discusses tools and techniques can be employed to make automation scripts easier to create and maintain. Finally, it suggests ways in which we can automate some of these solutions, and make tests self-healing.

Join Adam and Denis for a real deep dive into reducing test flakiness and how to overcome this challenge with the aid of AI.

Key Takeaways

• Identify flaky tests
• The AI and Machine learning tools to reduce flaky tests
• Learn to reduce your flaky tests

This talk is part of the EuroSTAR Deep Dive Week – Automation Edition. You are invited to enjoy live presentations, Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, eBooks, and blogs on automation.