AOE - Automated Object Extractor

While automating a web application, one of the biggest time-consuming manual effort for any automation engineer is to find the locator and validate the uniqueness of locator. These locators are used consistently in scripting various test scenarios of the said application.

This locator business becomes more challenging while the application in constantly changing. Another aspect, in an Agile/DevOps setup, while the team attempts to perform in-sprint automation, the product is still evolving within the sprint, how do we automate the stories?

To overcome these challenges, Ta3s has developed a unique solution, named – “Automated Object Extractor”.

What is a page Object/Locator? 

The page locator is termed as an address that identifies a web element uniquely within the webpage. Locators are the HTML properties of a web element which tells the Selenium about the web element it needs to perform the action on.

Identifying these elements has always been a very tricky subject and thus it requires an accurate and effective approach; also needed a larger manual effort. Thereby, we can assert that more accurate or effective the locator, more stable will be the automation script. Essentially every Selenium command requires locators to find the web elements. Thus, to identify these web elements accurately and precisely we have different types of locators, viz, ID, Class Name, Name, Link Test, XPath, CSS Selector (ID, Class, Attribute, Sub-String, Inner Text), etc.

Where it is used in test automation:

Locators provide a way to access the HTML elements from a web page. In Selenium, we can use locators to perform actions on various web elements types. We all know, locators are the basic building blocks of a web page. It is expected from a web developer to use a proper and consistent locator scheme for a website. Also, a test engineer must choose the correct locator strategy to automate the online workflows.

However, it gets tough at times to accurately identify a web UI element. And, we end up working with wrong elements or unable to find them, effectively spend enormous amount of manual effort.

How much time one waste performing this activity?

On an average web applicatiohis as n automation, 25%-30% of an automation engineer’s effort is spent on finding web elements. This effort is redundant and unnecessary. With a robust tool to automatically extract web element would make any and automation tester productive and eventually help the organization in saving substantial amount of wasted effort.

What is this plugin about?

Ta3s has identified this as a perennial problem with many automation project and have decided to help larger automation community with a free to use “Automated Object Extractor” or AOE plugin. Substantial effort and time have gone into developing this plugin which is now available on Google Chrome Store. You want to use it then login to the store, search for AOE and install it.

This plugin reduces the locator search effort to a insignificant time, just select the element type that you want and then press the extract button. Voila, you have all the elements downloaded in a excel sheet that you can directly import into your Selenium framework and use it. 

Download your plugin here

We encourage testers to install the plugin and appreciate your feedback. Please email us at [email protected] for feedback.