SleepReplacer-GPT: AI-Based Thread Sleep Replacement in Selenium WebDriver Tests

Ensuring the quality of modern web applications through end-to-end (E2E) testing is crucial, especially for dynamic systems like single-page applications. Managing asynchronous calls effectively is a key challenge, often addressed using thread sleeps or explicit waits. While thread sleeps are simple to use, they cause inefficiencies and flakiness, whereas explicit waits are more efficient but demand careful implementation. This work explores extending SleepReplacer, a tool that automatically replaces thread sleeps with explicit waits in Selenium WebDriver test suites. We aim to enhance its capabilities by integrating it with ChatGPT, enabling intelligent and automated replacement of thread sleeps with optimal explicit waits. This integration aims to improve code quality and reduce flakiness. We developed a structured procedure for interacting with ChatGPT and validated it on three test suites and synthetic examples covering diverse cases. Results show that the LLM-based approach correctly replaces thread sleeps with explicit waits on the first attempt, consistently outperforming SleepReplacer. These findings support integrating ChatGPT with SleepReplacer to create a smarter, more efficient tool for managing asynchronous behavior in test suites.