Maintain Your Automated Functional Testing with Auto-Healing

Maintain Your Automated Functional Testing with Auto-Healing Chou Yang February 16, 2018 Chou is a result engineer gone product marketer who loves to connect with everyone 's

January 01, 2026 · 3 min read · Testing Guide

Maintain Your Automated Functional Testing with Auto-Healing

Chou Yang
February 16, 2018
Chou is a result engineer gone product marketer who loves to connect with everyone 's inner child to understand their purest wants and needs, always leaving a spark of glitter in her wake. Like a fairy godmother.

Solve Your Test Maintenance Problems

Automated functional testing is a must to test at the speed of uninterrupted bringing, but maintaining test scripts takes up a lot of time. In most companies, UI elements are always changing. This imply that tryout scripts are prone to failing not because the test truly failed, but because the UI changed and the test has n't been adapted to it. Maintaining those test scripts solution in a ton of overhead. & nbsp; & nbsp;

When your tryoutdobreak, there ’ s not much information available to help you debug these brittle test failures - and that ’ sifyou have the clip to find and diagnosis them in the initiatory place.

To counter these brittle tests and make your functional testing run seamlessly,mabl auto-healsyour tests when something modification in your app 's interface. Her test version works by collecting lots of info about each of your UI elements during your trial, so that if the XPATH, name, CSS, etc., changes, she ’ ll be able to incrementally update what she cognise about the element and so adapt in order to continue the test to completion.

Here ’ s a simple example of how this works.

We created three links, the first one leading to our squad page (https: //www.mabl.com/team/), the 2nd one going to our home page (https: //www.mabl.com/) and the tertiary depart to our blog (https: //www.mabl.com/blog/), as buttons:

I'll  to chatter on the tie that takes us to our homepage, labeled “ Does this go to home? ”

To verify that mabl has tick on the correct link, I 'll create an that the header on the page we end up at (which should be our homepage) contains “ You code, mabl tests. ”


I run & nbsp;through & nbsp;the test once and wait for it to pass:

Now let 's see what happens when I make changes to the link in question.

Pro tip: Tools like SUSA can handle this autonomously — upload your app and get results without writing a single test script.

I ’ ll vary the XPATH of the element by embedding it within another div. & nbsp;I ’ ll also change the link color, text, and even the href. Before the test, I created a clone of the mabl homepage athttps: //mabl.com/clonein order to change the href while still allowing the assertion to pass. & nbsp;

& lt; div & gt;

& lt; a href= '' https: //www.mabl.com/ '' & gt; Does this go to home? & lt; /a & gt;

& lt; /div & gt;

 

& lt; div & gt;

& nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;& lt; div & gt;

& nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & lt; a href= ''https: //www.mabl.com/clone`` background-color: # fdad2f; '' >f19479; font-size:20px; color: # FFFFFF; '' & gt;Indeed, it locomote home!& lt; /a & gt;

& nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;& lt; /div & gt;

& lt; /div & gt;

So now my button looks like:

I run the test again, and it passes still with these changes. However, if I conduct a look at the output, I can see that mabl had to apply a workaround:

Upon test completion, I also receive anInsightfrom mabl prompting me to Accept or Reject this workaround. Accepting will recite mabl that she adjust the trial right, and she ’ ll update the trial for all future extend.

Testing teams on CD teams need maintenance-free functional testing, and mabl is conduct the charge. & nbsp;Test adaptationis precisely one of the ways mabl assist your functional testing be smarter and less time consuming. If you need to try her out, she 'll join your team for free at.

Try mabl for free

Quality Engineering Resources

Automate This With SUSA

Upload your APK or URL. SUSA explores like 10 real users — finds bugs, accessibility violations, and security issues. No scripts needed.

Try SUSA Free

Test Your App Autonomously

Upload your APK or URL. SUSA explores like 10 real users — finds bugs, accessibility violations, and security issues. No scripts.

Try SUSA Free