Test automationcan automate some repetitive, but necessary tasks. But if youre not careful, you can quickly fall into the rabbit hole of chasing failing tests and lose sight of the equally necessary exploratory questions:Can our users easily complete the user journey? Are there potential bugs with this journey? Is the quality of this journey regressing?

Tests are brittle because the underlying mechanics of XPaths, CSS selectors, element IDs, and other descriptors are often tightly coupled with automated tests. This is particularly painful when you have apps with dynamic locators or locators that arent necessarily unique, such as can be the case with Angular and React apps.

A machine-learning-driven testing solution like mabl handles apps with dynamic UIs to help testers focus on the human side of testing, which makes the testing role so unique and powerful in the first place.

How does mabl do this? Its all built into her test adaptation ability.

As testers interact with themabl trainerto create a test, under the covers, mabl captures your user journeys using our own proprietary domain-specific language. She also gathers a great deal of DOM element attributes, properties, and visual details (like XPaths, tag names, class attributes, text, and various contextual identifiers) to help identify conceptually equivalent elements in future test runs of the journey.

So now that she has an understanding of the user journey, as well as all this additional information, mabl knows enough about each action in the journey to identify the appropriate element again, or find likely replacements for it as the UI changes.When theres only one likely candidate available, mabl will incrementally update her models for the corresponding step of the journey, so tests will stay up to date even after several successive UI changes.

Much of this information can even be applied to the same journey in other environments, so tests running through the same app will run consistently. As mabl gathers more information about replacement candidates across many apps, this will ultimately be used in more advanced models to prioritize future candidates across journeys and even across apps.

But the question is regardingrobustchanges; can mabl still adapt? What does mabl do when theres no obvious right answer?

mabl uses the collected information to be experimental. Based on past identifications of elements, she can rank partial and uncertain matches.To verify if the experimental action was correct, mabl evaluates how the remainder of the journey unfolds.

For example, she considers whether assertions pass, whether she can complete subsequent actions, and the visual appearance of the resulting app state compared to previous runs. If mabl determines that her fix for the test was successful,shell let you know what the proposed fix was.From here, you can simply reject mabls fix for the journey if it was incorrect, and mabl will remember that for future runs.

As mentioned at the onset, one of the difficulties with handling a variety of modern web frameworks like Angular and React is that they rely heavily on DOM manipulation and JavaScript execution. In particular, the DOM elements generated by these frameworks often include minimal and opaque attributes, making them hard to distinguish.

However,humansmust be able to recognize how to take a particular action across iterations of the UI; mabl gathers some of the same contextual clues.Although element attributes may be insufficient to identify a particular element for interaction during a journey, there are a variety of other dynamic or computed properties to be used, like inner text and rendered location or size.

Consider a simple example of a dynamically generated list in an Angular app withngFor(similarly withng-repeatin AngularJS 1.x or an array of generated list elements in React):

In this example, we have a screen that shows a list of user roles in a hypothetical app where each role can be clicked to get a detailed description of the role. This gets instantiated as a series of list (