«Self-Healing Tests» The Holy Grail of Test Automation… Or Just a Lot of Noise About Nothing?

One of the most important and complex tasks in test automation is the maintenance of test scripts. No other test artifact takes up as much time and effort in maintenance.

Is there an approach where artificial intelligence (AI) paired with machine learning (ML) could be used to maintain test scripts? Developers of test scripts would then have more time to automate new tests, thereby increasing test coverage through test automation.

The answer is yes, and the solution is Self-Healing Tests.

In a nutshell, self-healing is the automation of test automation. Test tools with self-healing properties recognize changes in the graphical user interface and automatically adapt the automated test cases so that the tests remain functional. Commercial tools like TestIM, Mabl & Tricentis Neo-Engine are very promising, but there are also interesting open-source alternatives such as Healenium.

This talk explains the basics of self-healing tests and provides a concrete example of an implementation with the open-source library Healenium.