Automation testing has become an essential part of app development life cycle. It helps to reduce manual testing efforts, ensures better quality, and accelerates the app delivery process. However, one of the significant challenges in maintaining automation scripts is dealing with changing locators and web elements.

Locators and web elements refer to the attributes that identify an object in the UI. These include ID, name, class, tag, and other attributes. They are used by automation scripts to interact with the UI elements. When these locators or web elements change, it leads to the failure of automation scripts. As a result, the maintenance of automation scripts becomes challenging, and the testing process becomes less efficient.

There are several reasons why locators and web elements change. For example, the UI design may change, or the developers may modify the HTML structure of the web application. Additionally, changes to the underlying technology stack, such as upgrading a framework or library, may also affect the locators and web elements.

To overcome these challenges, it’s important to have a robust maintenance strategy for automation scripts.

Here are a few best practices that can help:

1.Use unique locators:

Use locators that are unique and specific to the element you’re trying to interact with. Avoid using generic locators like class or tag, as they can change frequently and affect the automation scripts.

2. Use a centralized locator repository:

Maintain a centralized repository of locators and web elements. This helps in updating the locators and elements quickly whenever they change.

3.Implement robust error handling:

Implement robust error handling mechanisms to handle the failures due to locator changes. This includes retry mechanisms, reporting, and logging.

4.Regular maintenance:

Regularly review and update the automation scripts to ensure they are up-to-date with the latest changes in the application.

There are various self-healing tools that simplify the work of automation engineers by enabling self-healing of various automation processes. During automated web testing, test cases may fail due to changes in web elements and locators in updated builds. However, with a robust self-healing tool, these changes are automatically incorporated into the scripts, resulting in successful Web UI testing and execution. This plugin is compatible with Appium and Selenium automation scripts and ensures that the scripts remain reliable and easy to run by repairing them automatically whenever changes are made to web elements or object locators.

Advantages of using a the Self-Healing Tool

• One of the significant advantages of using a self-healing tool is that it improves the stability of the scripts. With the automated repair process, the scripts are updated with the latest web elements or object locators, ensuring that they remain stable and reliable even when changes are made in the development. This feature eliminates the need for manual script maintenance, which can be time-consuming and prone to errors.
• Another advantage of leveraging various self-healing tools is that it reduces maintenance efforts for automation engineers. Instead of spending hours or days trying to fix failed scripts due to changes in web elements or object locators, automation engineers can now rely on various self-healing tools to automate the maintenance process. This feature helps improve the efficiency of the testing process, as automation engineers can now focus on other critical tasks, such as creating new test cases and improving the overall test coverage.
• Additionally, using a robust self-healing tool enables efficient CI pipelines by ensuring that automation scripts remain stable and updated with the latest changes in the development. With stable automation scripts, the testing process becomes faster and more efficient, helping organizations to deliver better-quality software in less time.

  Script maintenance can be a significant challenge for automation engineers, especially when dealing with changes to web elements or object locators. Using a robust self-healing tool offers a solution to this problem by automatically repairing the scripts with updated web elements or object locators.

Conclusion

Using self-healing for your automation scripts is an effective solution to the challenges of script maintenance in test automation. With this feature, automation engineers can automate the maintenance process, improve the stability of scripts, and reduce maintenance efforts, enabling faster and more efficient testing processes. This feature enables them to focus on other critical aspects of test automation, such as creating new test cases, improving existing scripts, and delivering better test coverage. Happy Testing!