Investigating the Adoption and Maintenance of Web GUI Testing: Insights from GitHub Repositories

Abstract

Context: Web GUI testing is a quality assessment practice aimed at evaluating the functionality of web applications from the perspective of its end users. While prior studies have explored the technical challenges of automated Web GUI testing, fewer works have explored how this practice is applied in real-world web apps.

Objective: This study aims to investigate the adoption, characteristics, and maintenance of automated web GUI testing practices in open-source web applications, focusing on identifying trends and providing actionable insights for researchers and practitioners.

Method: We conducted a large-scale empirical analysis of 472 web applications on the GitHub platform, developed in Java, JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript. These projects use popular browser automation frameworks like Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, and Puppeteer. The study involved examining project characteristics and analyzing the co-evolution and maintenance of automated web GUI tests over time.

Result: Our findings empirically document automated web GUI testing adoption patterns in open-source projects, providing insights into the practical drivers behind both initial framework adoption and migration between different testing frameworks. Projects incorporating these tests generally show higher community engagement and consistent maintenance efforts. The analysis reveals that Web GUI tests tend to co-evolve with the underlying applications, reflecting their integration into the development lifecycle.

Conclusion: The study provides valuable insights into the prevalence and maintenance of Web GUI testing, highlighting practical implications for improving testing practices. Our findings can guide further research on the matter and support practitioners in enhancing their testing strategies.

Data and code availability

The data employed in this study and the code used for our analyses and data visualizations are freely available in the replication package we prepared at .