Self-Healing

Overview

Self-healing is a functionality devised to address the challenge of identifying evolving objects as applications undergo changes. Widely available across automation testing tools, this feature intelligently adapts to changes in the application under test.

In an environment marked by rapid product releases and updates, test scripts often bear the brunt of frequent changes, necessitating ongoing maintenance. Self-healing alleviates this burden by dynamically adjusting to alterations in element locators, ensuring test scripts remain robust and reliable.

How Self-Healing Works

Once an element is successfully identified on a page source, its pathway is stored for future reference. If the same element is subsequently sought but cannot be found using the original locator, the self-healing mechanism kicks in.

In certain scenarios, elements may alter their locators due to updates in their build. Nonetheless, the self-healing feature can autonomously detect the updated element and heal the broken locator, ensuring test continuity.

Limitations

Non-recoverable errors

Self-healing capabilities are limited to recovering from specific types of errors, such as WebDriver initialization issues or stale element references. It cannot fix fundamental test logic errors.

Test accuracy

Self-Healing will surely help with test maintenance. However, it might disguise real issues within your application or scripts. It is vital to review healed elements periodically.

Performance impact

Enabling Self-Healing might reduce the speed of test execution time due to additional checks and workflows to your scripts. It even extends the overall test duration in some cases.

How to use in Pcloudy

Utilize the provided link to establish a remote WebDriver connection within the Pcloudy platform:

Terminal

https://device.pcloudy.com/healenium/wd/hub

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