Katalon Studio is a free automation testing solution developed by Katalon LLC. The software is built on top of the open-source automation frameworks Selenium, Appium with a specialized IDE interface for API, web and mobile testing. Its first public release was in September 2016. In 2018, the software acquired for 9% of market penetration for UI test automation, according to The State of Testing 2018 Report by SmartBear.
Katalon is recognized as a March 2019 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Software Test Automation.
Open-source software (OSS) is a type of computer software in which source code is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative public manner. Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration.
Open-source software development can bring in diverse perspectives beyond those of a single company. A 2008 report by the Standish Group stated that adoption of open-source software models have resulted in savings of about $60 billion (£48 billion) per year for consumers.
The test automation framework provided within Katalon Studio was developed with the keyword-driven approach as the primary test authoring method with data-driven functionality for test execution.
The user interface is a complete integrated development environment (IDE) implemented on Eclipse rich client platform (RCP).
The keyword libraries are a composition of common actions for web, API, and mobile testings. External libraries written in Java can be imported into a project to be used as native functions.
The main scripting language is Groovy, Java, and JavaScript and can be executed against all modern browsers, iOS, and Android applications supported by Selenium and Appium.
Katalon Studio provides a dual interchangeable interface for scripting: a recording-tabular editor for the less technical users and a scripting IDE gearing toward experienced testers to author automation tests with syntax highlight and intelligent code completion.
Intelligent code completion is a context-aware code completion feature in some programming environments that speeds up the process of coding applications by reducing typos and other common mistakes. Attempts to do this are usually done through auto completion popups when typing, querying parameters of functions, query hints related to syntax errors, etc. Intelligent code completion and related tools serve as documentation and disambiguation for variable names, functions and methods using reflection.
Intelligent code completion appears in many program environments, an example implementation being Visual Studio’s IntelliSense. The term was originally popularized as “picklist” and some implementations still refer to it as such.
Katalon Studio follows the Page Object Model pattern. GUI elements and API methods can be captured using the recording utility and stored into the Object Repository which is accessible and reusable across different test cases.
Test planning can be structured using test suites with environment variables. Test execution can be parameterized and parallelized using profiles.
The remote execution can be triggered by CI systems via Docker container or command line interface (CLI).
Katalon Recorder is a browser add-on for recording user’s actions in web applications and generating test scripts. Katalon Recorder supports both Chrome and Firefox. It works the same way as Katalon Studio’s recording utility, but it can also execute test steps and export test scripts in many languages such as C#, Java, and Python.
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