Industrial Replication of COLOR: Locator Repair in Continuous Integration and Failure Patterns under UI/DOM Evolution

Authors:
Open Access
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Web applications evolve rapidly, and UI changes cause automated end-to-end tests to fail. This paper reports a conceptual, independent replication of the COLOR locator repair approach. We reimplemented COLOR from its published description and deployed our implementation in an industrial Continuous Integration (CI) system, where tests are executed automatically on every codebase change. We analysed 4,471 test executions across 133 CI days spanning over seven months, categorised recurring failure modes, and found locator breakage and element visibility issues to be the dominant causes of instability. We analysed failure patterns introduced with evolution, collected element descriptors at runtime and deployed replication of the locator repair technique (COLOR) when locators fail. The repair mechanism suggested fixes for all captured broken locators, with the top recommendation correct in most cases, while exposing limitations caused by initially missing element data, dynamically generated locators, and sparse or volatile HTML attributes. Our results quantify the impact of attribute composition on repairability and highlight practical integration challenges for automated repair in daily CI workflows.

This publication has 26 references indexed in Scilit: