Web Controls Identifier for Test Automation

Abstract

In software development life cycle testing is one of the main phases that help to ensure that quality product is given to the customer. Testers sometimes verify the same scenarios or similar scenarios with different combinations in different phases of software development life cycle. Therefore software testing involves repetitive testing. Test case automation comes into play to help reducing the effort of these repetitive test cases. There are tools, frameworks available to support test automation. Software test automation tools use several approaches to automate test scenarios. As per the software industry standards, best way of writing test automation scripts is page objects approach. This approach is derived by Object Orientation. In page object approach, web control events implementation is written in one set of classes. There are several challenges that are faced while developing test scripts. When writing page objects it is required to identify all the web elements available in a page. It takes considerable effort and time to identify all the web elements using this method. It is difficult to locate hidden element, dynamically generated IDs, Web controls inside frames/iframes and web control without IDs by most of the existing tools. Most to the existing issue face browser compatibility issue while locating web controls. In order to address above research have being done to implement a tool called Web Controls Identifier for Test Automation. In this tool It generates the HTML code using the URl specified by user. It provides web control locators in two methods and they are by Xpath and By Id/Name. It also provides capture locators of hidden web elements. By providing Xpath locators this tool resolves the issue of dynamic IDs and web control without IDs. New tool has a mechanism locate web controls inside frames/iframes. This tool is a supportive tool for test automation and it also provides method template for the available web control. There’s a feature to verify the generated Xpaths using the tool itself. Test case automation will be more efficient and effective by using this tool.