Automated GUI Refactoring and Test Script Repair (Position Paper)

To improve the overall user experience, graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of successful software systems evolve continuously. While the evolution is beneficial for end users, it creates several problems for developers and testers. Developers need to manually change the GUI code. Testers need to manually inspect and repair highly fragile test scripts. This is time-consuming and error-prone. The state-of-the-art tools for automatic GUI test repair use a black-box approach: they try to infer the changes between two GUI versions and then apply these changes to the test scripts. However, inferring these changes is challenging. We propose a white-box approach where the GUI changes are automated and knowledge about them is reused to repair the test cases appropriately. We use GUI refactorings as a means to encode the evolution of the GUIs. We envision a smart IDE that will record these refactorings precisely as they happen and will use them to change the GUI code and to repair test cases. We illustrate our approach through an example, discuss challenges that should be overcome to turn our vision into reality, and present a research agenda to address these challenges.