Hands-On Review: Use Katalon Studio 7 To Simplify Automation

An In-Depth Review Of The Phenomenal Features Of Katalon Studio 7:

Katalon Studio is a simple and easy-to-use solution for Web, API, Mobile, and Desktop Automated testing.

The latest version – Katalon Studio 7 (KS7) comes with many significant changes along with essential features and updates including Smart execution, Desktop App Testing, Test Artifacts Sharing, Private Plugin Capabilities, and much more.

Let’s explore these new features!!

Katalon Studio 7: A Complete Review Of The Best Codeless Automation Tool

This tutorial will walk you through the various exceptional features offered by Katalon Studio 7 for your easy understanding of the tool.

Before that, you may download the tool on the below link. It’s free.

=> Get Katalon Studio from the Official Website

Let’s Start!!

Desktop App Testing

This exciting feature comes with the new release of KS7. You can now implement your automation scripts for desktop apps.

KS7 supports Selenium-based Automated testing for UI on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016, including Universal Windows Platform (UWP), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms (WinForms) and Classic Windows (Win32).

You may run tests locally (on macOS and Linux) or remotely to test the app from a different Windows device. If you are familiar with the Spy Tool or Recording and Playback capabilities for testing on web or mobile, then you can also use them for desktop app testing under the names Spy Windows Objects and Record Windows Action.

These functions help in reducing the configuration effort. Thus, your teams can now minimize the configuration steps and focus more on inspecting locators, recording actions, and much more.

There is also a rich set of Windows built-in keywords to simplify certain test steps, as well as extending your testing capabilities. KS7 covers the testing needs on all Automation platforms, including web app, API, Mobile, and Desktop app testing at the moment.

Smart Waits And Execution

Most web applications are now developed using Ajax and Javascript techniques. Thus, sometimes the page will be loaded successfully by the web browsers, however, the elements on that page might not be ready or loaded at different time intervals.

Automating such web apps could be tricky, and you may fall into the trap of timing problems. This case is usually handled by two different types of waits: Explicit and Implicit waits.

An explicit wait is a code that you define to wait for a particular condition to occur before proceeding with further steps.

An implicit wait tells the WebDriver to poll the DOM (Document Object Model) with a certain amount of time while trying to find the web element or elements if they are not immediately available on the web pages.

But even if you set explicit or implicit waits, you still have to use an element that is not yet loaded by the Ajax or Javascript call and receive an exceptional message. Misunderstanding or not following the best practices of implicit and explicit waits can lead to unpredictable wait times.

The new feature in Katalon Studio 7 called Smart Waits can fix these issues. This feature helps to detect an unsuccessful element loaded on the website without any additional scripting.

Smart Wait will tell the WebDriver to wait for the page to become complete before any operations are performed, and the mechanism will make sure that all front-end processes, including Javascript or Ajax, finish their jobs before running the next automation step to reduce the failure cases.

You can turn on the Enable option from the Project Settings to apply Smart Wait to all web elements in a test project, or use it for certain test elements only.

Test Artifacts Sharing

Katalon Studio 7 allows exporting and importing Test Artifacts across different projects with Test Artifacts sharing. This feature comes in handy when you work on multiple projects and would like to share or reuse the Test Artifacts to increase test reusability.

Test Artifacts include test cases, test objects, profiles, and custom keywords. This feature brings a lot of benefits and saves time instead of recreating the things that are already there.

Private Plugin And Offline Activation

In the previous versions, if you want to install and use plugins, you need to download from www.store.katalon.com. But the latest version enables you to build private plugins and distribute them directly without having to upload to the Katalon Store. Private plugins are only used by authenticated organizational users and are not for public use.

There are three options for you:

• Katalon Store and Local: Katalon Studio will install plugins from the Katalon Store and the Plugins folder of each project.
• Katalon Store: Katalon Studio will install plugins from the Katalon Store only.
• Local: Katalon Studio will install plugins from the Plugins folder only.

The new version is also packed with new privacy and security features to support offline activation mechanisms and deal with network security compliance needs.

There are many reasons for enterprises to be concerned about Cybersecurity. Internet connection may result in the exposure of sensitive information to various attack angles, thereby creating room for hackers to exploit. If a tool cannot be separated from the internet, then extra measures need to be taken to ensure security.

When projects and data are locally stored, the data and files will have no chance of getting breached over the internet. Moreover, all the internet connection mechanisms such as version updates or usage statistics collection can be turned off in the Enterprise license.

Custom Test Data Sources

Starting from the version 7.0.0, Katalon Studio users can configure additional database sources with the supported JDBC Driver field. JDBC stands for Java Database Connectivity. JDBC is the Java API to connect and execute the query with the database.

These settings allow you to set a global database connection to be used in other features of Katalon Studio. Katalon Studio supports the following databases: MySQL, SQLServer, Oracle, and Postgres.

Test Objects And Custom Keywords Refactoring

Test Object Refactoring is an ability to view and manage the unused Test Objects. This feature gives you insights on which objects are useful & easy to organize and thereby keep them up-to-date. For significant and long-term projects, this feature is critical for keeping your object repository neat and clean.

An unused Test Object can be any web, web service, mobile, Windows Test Object that you haven’t referred to in any Test case, Test listener, or keyword and should be removed from your project.

Custom Keyword Refactoring is the new feature that allows you to move a Custom Keyword from a package to another. Katalon Studio updates the new package and keyword identifier in the Test Scripts accordingly.

Besides the features listed above, KatalonStudio 7 also includes other functionalities such as supporting manual uploading of Test Suite Collections’ results to KatalonTestOps, Connecting to Git via SSH, Allowing to customize Test Explorer, Custom Keywords refactoring and so on.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, combined with the previous features, Katalon Studio 7 is a promising, complete, and extremely user-friendly tool for test automation.

Furthermore, Katalon Studio is built on top of Selenium which is the most popular open-source Automation tool but is enhanced with advanced features and reliable stability. If you are a Selenium lover, then you would surely love Katalon and what it can do for your Automation projects.

We hope this tutorial helped you understand the new features in Katalon Studio 7. You can download Katalon Studio for free at the Katalon Website.

Have you tried Katalon Studio 7 yet? Please share your experience/queries in the comments below.