WATERFALL: an incremental approach for repairing record-replay tests of web applications

Abstract

Software engineers use record/replay tools to capture use case scenarios that can serve as regression tests for web applications. Such tests, however, can be brittle in the face of code changes. Thus, researchers have sought automated approaches for repairing broken record/replay tests. To date, such approaches have operated by directly analyzing differences between the releases of web applications. Often, however, intermediate versions or commits exist between releases, and these represent finer-grained sequences of changes by which new releases evolve. In this paper, we present WATERFALL, an incremental test repair approach that applies test repair techniques iteratively across a sequence of fine-grained versions of a web application. The results of an empirical study on seven web applications show that our approach is substantially more effective than a coarse-grained approach (209% overall), while maintaining an acceptable level of overhead.