What is Automated testing?

Automation testing is a testing technique that consists of special automated testing software tools to execute a test case. These test cases are instructions that are created to do something for you repeatedly without human intervention other than creating the script.

Why do we want to eliminate human intervention?

Simple, humans can make mistakes, whereas software is deterministic. With automation, you can execute the same test repeatedly without a mistake. One of the benefits of this is that now you can run automated tests unattended. A good example of where automation would be useful is regression testing. Regression testing is where we as software testers test that previous features that were developed are not broken when the newly modified code goes in. Regression testing can take a considerable amount of time if done manually and the time further increases as the size and scope of the project do. With automated testing, you increase the speed of test execution, which leads to reporting the defects to the development team faster, and therefore maintain the quality of the software consistently and throughout the development phase.

What is Katalon Studio?

Katalon Studio is an automation tool that was released way back in January 2015. Katalon is designed to be a low-code and scalable automation framework to create test scripts and reuse test scripts fast.  The setup of Katalon studio is easy. Just download the app and off you go. Out of the box, it has an easy-to-use page object model design to manage web elements. Katalon Studio also included a large library of built-in keywords to create test cases. 

You do not need programming skills to start creating your first automation test case. There are three ways to create test cases in Katalon Studio. You can record your actions and do a playback. Secondly, you can create tests manually with the built-in keywords. And finally, the alternative way is a scripting mode for people with more advanced skills to write code in java and groovy.  

To me personally, Katalon Studio is a one-stop shop for all your needs. It integrates nicely with Azure DevOps. Katalon is a robust solution for end-to-end WebUI, Mobile, desktop, and API testing.  After running your tests you can review your testing results in full detail in Log, PDF, HTML, and even CSV. Testing results can also be published to Katalon TestOps, this is part of their enterprise solution that’s a platform for QA orchestration (Planning, design, and schedule) you can also see test analytics and advanced reports.

Why do we use Katalon?

Katalon Studio supports many native integrations with many popular CI/CD tools to create automated end-to-end regression tests. Some of them are Azure DevOps, Github, Jenkins and Gitlab, and a few more. With this, you have the ability to run tests in a CLI mode and through pipeline triggers, you can execute your test suites.

Imagine this, you have a developer that pushes code in the middle of the night. Who is going to test that the new code did not break any functionality in the existing code base? Now with CI/CD the testing can happen automatically thus this is a faster release cycle, therefore, lower risk of the release, Lower cost for bug fixing, and ultimately produce a higher quality of software.

The outcome of setting up CI/CD. You can fail fast. Developers can fix bugs faster and we can deliver stable code consistently. This is a must-have and Katalon studio has made it easy with their Katalon Runtime Environment. Some test suites (this is a collection of test cases) take time to set up initially but once you have everything set up and the code drops and the pipeline triggers testing can start automatically. Another cool feature is that Katalon is fully integrated with Azure Test plans in Azure DevOps with this it provides developers with the testing results. They do not need to wait for a manual tester the next day or in 30 min to test their code.  They will be able to see the Katalon testing reports in Azure DevOps under Test Runs.  

With Katalon Studio we can increase test coverage. With more test cases or test scenarios and more input data does not always mean you will find more bugs but the chances are better and we gain more confidence in the software that we are delivering.

Katalon also has a feature that can run test suite collections in parallel depending on resource availability. Test suite collections are test cases that are in test suites but in a collection.  With this, you can run test cases in parallel.  This is very unique and this also reduces testing time.

There is also a retry failed execution setting when creating test suites that will rerun failed tests for a ‘x’ number of times. This reduces false positive errors.

We also use other testing methodologies that Katalon supports and has built in, like Data driven testing or DTT. In Katalon you can easily set up one test case to run against different input data. Data files can be set up with a Microsoft Excel file, CSV, internal data created inside Katalon, or external data from a database as the input data for a test case. The faster we can test something and reduce test execution time and increase test coverage, the faster we are shortening the software development life cycle at the end of the day.

Why do we use want to use Katalon Studio vs Manual testing?

We need to look at the pros and cons of Katalon automation vs the pros and cons of manual testing. I’ve only listed the top three of each that stood out for me.

My take on this is that yes there are many more pros and cons between manual and Katalon Studio automation but the future lies in automation testing because of its scalability.

Katalon Studio is a must-have for any software testing team of any size. Katalon Studio has proven to be powerful and easy to use. At the end of the day, you need to have testing done quickly and reliably without sacrificing quality.  Katalon Studio empowers every role of the business, from the Tester to the Dev to the product owner to all stakeholders. Katalon Studio in my opinion enables us to produce high-quality software.