Use AI self-healing for your automated tests

Learn how to use AI self-healing feature on your tests with BrowserStack Automate.

BrowserStack’s self-healing feature for automated tests enables automatic recovery from locator changes or sub-optimal locator strategies during test execution. This feature enhances test suite robustness, reduces test flakiness, and improves reliability.

Enable self-healing

To enable the self-healing feature, set the selfHeal capability to true in your test configuration file.

MutableCapabilities capabilities = new MutableCapabilities();
HashMap<String, Object> browserstackOptions = new HashMap<String, Object>();
browserstackOptions.put("userName", "YOUR_USERNAME");
browserstackOptions.put("accessKey", "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY");
browserstackOptions.put("selfHeal", "true");
capabilities.setCapability("bstack:options", browserstackOptions);

var capabilities = {
	'bstack:options' : {
		"userName" : "YOUR_USERNAME",
		"accessKey" : "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY",
		"selfHeal" : "true"
	}
}

Dictionary<string, object> browserstackOptions = new Dictionary<string, object>();
browserstackOptions.Add("userName", "YOUR_USERNAME");
browserstackOptions.Add("accessKey", "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY");
browserstackOptions.Add("selfHeal", "true");
capabilities.AddAdditionalOption("bstack:options", browserstackOptions);

$caps = array(
	'bstack:options' => array(
		"userName" => "YOUR_USERNAME",
		"accessKey" => "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY",
		"selfHeal" => "true"
	)
)

desired_cap = {
	'bstack:options' : {
		"userName" : "YOUR_USERNAME",
		"accessKey" : "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY",
		"selfHeal" : "true"
	},
}

capabilities = {
	'bstack:options' => {
		"userName" => "YOUR_USERNAME",
		"accessKey" => "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY",
		"selfHeal" => "true"
	}
}

All your tests that are recovered by self-heal appear on the dashboard marked by the self-heal icon as shown in the following image:

You can view these self-healed locators in the Text Logs tab of your session masked by the self-heal icon

You can filter the self-healed builds using the builds filter and selecting the Healed option under Self-Healing dropdown.

You can also filter your self-healed sessions using the sessions filter and selecting the Healed option under Self-Healing dropdown.

You can filter the Text Logs to only view the self-healed locators as shown in the following image:

How Self-heal Works

The self-healing functionality of Selenium Locator represents an advanced approach in test automation aimed at mitigating the volatility of inconsistent tests. This system intelligently adjusts locators by consolidating attributes and context, thereby promoting robustness and flexibility. Throughout runtime, it continuously observes the web page to detect any changes in the Document Object Model (DOM).

Once an element is successfully located on the page, its DOM path is logged for future reference. In the event that the same element is subsequently referenced on the page but cannot be found, the system analyzes the current page state and generates new locators for modified elements based on past references.

The self-healing feature automatically detects new locators that were changes by web elements and continues the test execution.

Self-heal advantages

Self-healing has a crucial role in streamlining the test automation process. Following are its advantages:

Self-heal limitations

Although the self-heal feature is engineered to handle a broad spectrum of issues, it comes with it’s own set of limitations, such as: