Tricentis Testim’s locator technologies ensure stable testing

At times, test automation can be a bit of a pain. You spend all this time writing tests, only to have them break the moment someone tweaks a button. Your test suite is now full of red, and you’re stuck debugging instead of shipping features. It’s frustrating and, frankly, it slows everything down.

Eliminating that experience is exactly why we built Tricentis Testim. Designed to keep up with the latest types of applications, our continuous innovation and new technologies make your life easier. Testim locators are built to support all types of applications you are developing, from web, mobile to Salesforce. Other tools simply don’t offer this level of intelligence or flexibility. Their static selectors are unable to identify all elements within an application, leading to more test failures and more time spent on maintenance. But Testim uses AI to heal and even improve tests over time, ensuring your tests are built to adapt to changes in your application, so you can focus on building, not babysitting.

As you can see in the graphic above, Testim has different locator technologies for different application types.

How locators work in Testim

Before diving into the different types of locators, it is important to understand how Testim approaches element identification at a high level. Locators are the foundation of test automation frameworks and are how your tests see and interact with your application.

In traditional automation tools, a single static selector is used to identify an element. That is fine, until your UI changes. Then your tests break and you are stuck fixing these selectors.

Smart locators

Testim takes a smarter, layered approach. At the core of Testim’s locator strategy is the concept of locators and fallbacks. When Testim runs a test, it first attempts to identify an element using the most reliable or high-confidence locator available. These are typically smart AI or machine learning) (ML)locators. If for some reason that primary locator fails to find an element, Testim doesn’t stop the test. Rather, it automatically evaluates a series of fallback locators, each using a different strategy to find the element.

This multi-layered approach ensures that even if your app changes, your tests continue to work. This approach provides a balance between testing speed and resilience for tests that easily find application elements and those that need additional locator types. This results in fewer test failures, less maintenance, and more time available to innovate.

Self-healing locators

If your app changes, Testim doesn’t just throw an error and stop. Instead, it uses AI to recalculate the locator using the latest version, evaluates other potential matches based on the original version, and selects the best match using a confidence threshold. If the match is strong, it automatically updates, improving locator performance. No manual intervention is needed.

Apps evolve, pages shift, and elements move. Testim keeps up with these changes by continuously checking locator performance across test runs. It identifies the most stable attributes and then updates the locator model to reflect the latest structure of your app. It’s an ongoing process where the more you test, the smarter your locators become.

Mobile only

ML locators

For mobile applications, Testim Mobile provides ML locators. These locators use an ML model trained using data from tens of thousands of mobile app examples to identify elements, providing a robust ability to find elements across a wide variety of apps. When running a test, the model generates a confidence score to determine if an element is a match. You can also tune a confidence threshold to balance the risk of false positives with added flexibility, depending on your application.

Resilience when using multiple locators

Vision Locate Fallback locators:

Testim’s AI-based Vision Locate Fallback provides stable tests for apps that would otherwise fail in hard-to-test scenarios. When a mobile test fails, Testim switches to Vision Locate as a fallback mechanism. Vision Locate uses a custom-trained AI vision model to analyze a screenshot of the application, detecting the interactive elements based on visual features and choosing the one that matches best.

Where other locators struggle, Vision Locate Fallback succeeds. Specifically, Vision Locate Fallback increases stability for Appium, physical devices, and various cross-platform, hybrid applications. There is no editing or intervention needed. Currently, Vision Locate Fallback is supported for mobile applications and we are working to bring this technology to all of Testim in the near future.

Enhanced Mode

Enhanced Mode is different from a traditional locator and supports similar functions, but with far more intelligence and flexibility. Unlike Appium, which requires testers to configure tests based on an app’s tech stack, Enhanced Mode uses a zero-knowledge approach. It automatically adapts to your app’s structure, eliminating the need for prior setup or deep technical knowledge.

At the core of Enhanced Mode is Waldo, Tricentis’s proprietary technology that enriches the application under test. Rather than relying solely on the app’s native view hierarchy, Waldo builds its own enriched tree structure. This gives Testim a deeper understanding of your app’s internal structure and allows it to detect and interact with UI elements that other frameworks often miss, especially in hybrid or cross-platform environments like Flutter and React Native.

Enhanced Mode quickly scans the entire view hierarchy (under 500 ms), making it faster to create and execute mobile tests. Its unified API across all app types (hybrid, and cross-platform) eliminates the need to rewrite tests or use different tools for different environments. Unlike Appium, which requires testers to configure tests based on an app’s tech stack, Enhanced Mode uses a zero-knowledge approach. It automatically adapts to your app’s structure, eliminating the need for prior setup.

Enhanced Mode makes it possible to create stable tests for applications where Appium and other approaches struggle. It improves test stability, reduces maintenance, and expands test coverage. Teams can confidently automate the most complex mobile applications to deliver higher quality apps with less effort.

Good thing we offer free trials so you can experience this resilience firsthand.

Salesforce

Salesforce metadata locators

Salesforce’s dynamic UI, including Lightning, is notoriously difficult to test. Traditional test automation tools often struggle with its complex structure, dynamic elements, and unexpected pop-ups, often requiring tedious scripting or manual testing and frequent maintenance.

Testim Salesforce uses metadata locators to solve this challenge.

Powered by machine learning, they identify and adapt to these dynamic elements. They provide robust selectors using metadata for each element that remain the same across UI changes.

What makes these locators powerful is their deep understanding of Salesforce page elements and their relationships. Tests remain stable and reliable as your Salesforce application evolves. These locators also enable automating complex workflows, such as validating document content in PDFs — common scenarios that are difficult to automate with traditional tools.

Real business benefits you’ll notice

The technical innovation within Testim’s locators translates into real, measurable value for your team and your business. Their variety and flexibility prepare Testim to tackle different web, mobile, and Salesforce application types and make it easier to create tests while reducing maintenance.

Other testing tools struggle with fragile selectors that break every time an application changes. Testim takes a different approach. Its use of machine learning, vision AI, and Salesforce metadata produces tests that are more stable and require less maintenance. Teams can move faster and focus less on fixing broken tests and more on building and shipping features.

Testim is committed to bringing you the newest innovations and locator technologies found nowhere else. Choosing Testim gives your team the tools they need to do their best work. Its smarter, scalable approach to testing gives companies the edge in delivering high-quality software at speed.

Don’t believe us? Try it out for yourself for free!