Challenges of End-to-End Testing with Selenium WebDriver and How to Face Them: A Survey

Proceeding of 2023 IEEE 16th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2023), 16-20 April 2023, Dublin, Ireland. Modern web applications are complex and used for tasks of primary importance, so their quality must be guaranteed at the highest levels. For this reason, testing techniques (e.g., end-to-end) are required to validate the overall behavior of web applications. One of the most popular tools for testing web applications is Selenium WebDriver. Selenium WebDriver automates the browser to mimic real user actions on the web.While Selenium has made testing easier for many Teams worldwide, it still has its share of challenges. To better understand the challenges and the corresponding solutions adopted we decided to undertake a personal opinion survey from the industry (in total with 78 highly skilled participants) with a focus on the Selenium ecosystem.The results allow understanding which challenges are consid-ered more relevant by professionals in their daily practice and which are the techniques, approaches, and tools they adopt to face them. Therefore, this study is useful to (1) practitioners interested in understanding how to solve the problems they face every day and (2) researchers interested in proposing innovative solutions to problems having a solid industrial impact. This work was partially supported in part by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación-Agencia Estatal de Investigación (10.13039/501100011033) through the H2O Learn project under Grant PID2020-112584RB-C31, and in part by the Madrid Regional Government through the e-Madrid-CM Project under Grant S2018/TCS-4307.