Towards automated generation of PO-based WebDriver test suites from Selenium IDE recordings

Modern web applications require long quality assurance sessions to be appreciated by users. Test automation reduces delivery times but requires the development of effective and maintainable test scripts so that the advantages of its use are not lost. The usage of the Page object (PO) pattern has proven to be very effective in GUI testing, however, the manual development of Page objects, a sort of web page facade exposing methods to the test scripts, requires a relevant effort, which is often only repaid during evolution. In this paper, we describe a novel approach, almost totally automated, that takes advantage of the features offered by Selenium IDE for generating more maintainable Selenium WebDriver test scripts and Page objects for web applications. The only manual step required to the tester/developer is to add comments to the Selenese produced by Selenium IDE during registrations through a plugin. The very first estimate we conducted to evaluate our tool-based approach appears to be promising.