As test engineers, we are well aware that reusability, scalability, improving test coverage and time and effort saving are the primary benefits of test automation. Currently, these benefits are being achieved through Selenium integrated with other third party tools. But the framework is now giving way to a powerful and free test automation tool – Katalon Studio, that is taking the automation testing sector by storm!
Katalon Studio is a complete and thorough toolset for web and mobile app automation testing. It comes with a spectrum of powerful features, including pop-up, iFrame, wait-time and more, to overcome common challenges in Web UI test automation. This user-friendly solution helps testers test better, work faster and launch high quality software, thanks to the intelligence it adds to the whole test automation process.
Key Features of Katalon Studio
- Simple deployment: A single, well organized deployment package that contains everything a tester needs for deploying a powerful test automation tool.
- Quick & easy set-up: Beyond the simple installation, Katalon Studio makes it easy to set up the environment. Using Katalon’s pre-built templates and test scripts, it is very easy for testers to run their first test script.
- Faster & weightier outcomes: Built-in example copies, with clear steps on field-specific training, help testers create and run automation test rough writings expeditiously. Every step ranging from undertaking organization, test engenderment, execution, report generation and support, can be executed using Katalon.
- Flexible modes: New testers can use recordings and keywords to create automation tests, while expert testers can employ a full IDE to create increased rough writings.
- Easy usage: Manual testers with minimum programming skills can get the full benefits with very easy steps.
- Cross-browser application: Katalon supports the following platforms – Windows 32 and 64 (7, 8, and 10) and OS 4 X 10.5+.
Hands-on
Katalon studio minimizes the efforts of automation teams and individual testers in setting up a new project. It is very easy for them to execute the test cases and monitor the executed results. Each workflow provides ample customization for extremely easy maintenance and project scale-up :
- Pre-defined structure of test artifacts such as test cases, test suites, test objects, reports and more helps testers reduce their time in defining and maintaining them later.
- Custom keywords facilitate flexible integration of additional keywords to test the AUT efficiently, for categorical and involute testing purposes.
- Supports major testing needs: Web, Mobile and API.
- Provision to execute multiple test suites at once with test suite accumulation.
- Permits effortless elongation of current CI flow with console mode execution. Executing command line can be engendered efficiently utilizing ‘Generate Command Line for console mode’ feature.
- Monitor execution results seamlessly in Table or Tree view during/after execution.
- Detailed Test Suite reports can be generated that reduce the time taken to analyze results. The same can be exported in different format such as CSV, PDF, HTML and stored for later use.
Challenges to Selenium/Appium Predicated Frameworks
Consider a modern application which has web UI, a mobile app and web services to be automated. Applying test automation to the app using Selenium, including coding for automated test scenarios, publishing content from the web UI and verifying the same content in the database & web services, takes considerable time and effort. The same process needs to be repeated for mobile applications in Android and iOS platforms. To add to this challenging scenario, open-source automation solutions, like Selenium, require various third party tools for the integration and configuration of the application.
This impediment can be addressed by employing Katalon Studio. You can smoothly automate web, mobile, web accommodations and execute the scripts on your desired platform. While testers using Selenium take weeks to automate web, mobile apps and API, Katalon Studio can do it for you within a few hours!
Record and Playback Feature on Mobile and Web
Isn’t it cool to record your mobile app actions and organize test objects with ease? With Selenium, this is not possible without utilizing third party libraries. Katalon work-room is sharp enough to grasp net structure elements by making an adjustment to the test purpose properties with its built-in methods (Integrate/Abstract purpose Property) at run-time. Hold on!! Not just recording your actions performed on web applications, but with Katalon Studio, you can record your mobile app actions as well!
A Comparison between Katalon Studio and Selenium
Features
| Features | Katalon Studio | Selenium |
| Test development platform | Cross-platform | Cross-platform |
| Application under test | Web and mobile apps | Web apps |
| Scripting languages | Java/Groovy | Java, C#, Perl, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP |
| Programming skills | Not required. Recommended for advanced test scripts | Advanced skills needed to integrate various tools |
| Learning curves | Medium | High |
| Ease of installation and use | Easy to setup and run | Require installing and integrating various tools |
| Script creation time | Quick | Slow |
| Object storage and maintenance | Built-in object repository, XPath, object re-identification | XPath, UI Maps |
| Image-based testing | Built-in support | Require installing additional libraries |
| DevOps/ALM integrations | Many | No (require additional libraries) |
| Continuous integrations | Popular CI tools (e.g. Jenkins, TeamCity) | Various CI tools (e.g. Jenkins, Cruise Control) |
| Test Analytics | Katalon Analytics | No |
| Product support | Ticketing support, community, dedicated staff (third-party support services) | Open source community |
| License type | Freeware | Open source (Apache 2.0) |
| Cost | Free | Free |
Strengths and Weaknesses
| Tools | Strengths | Limitations |
| Katalon Studio | No licensing and maintenance fees required (if needed paid dedicated support services are available)
For quick test cases creation and execution important to integrate necessary frameworks and features Emerged on top of the Selenium framework but advanced programming skills which is required for selenium is not needed |
Quickly growing community, which emerges with the right solution
The feature set is still evolving Only Java/Groovy is supported as scripting language |
| Selenium | Open source, no licensing and maintenance fees
Large and active development and user community to keep pace with software technologies Open for integration with other tools and frameworks to enhance its capability |
Testing teams need to have good programming skills and experience to set up and integrate Selenium with other tools and frameworks
New teams need to invest time upfront for setup and integration Slow support from the community |
For more detaills, refer https://www.katalon.com/
