Fast Automated Testing with Katalon and Robot Framework
Most of the time in the part of development in software application, users request complex business logic to be implemented in a very tight time. Therefore, as long as business requirements grow, the team would like to start automated testing to ensure a more streamlined process since manual testing is not suitable again for critical and complex applications in terms of both human resources and time. With automated testing, development team can save approximately about 68% of the overall software testing process and therefore shorten the product launch cycle (M. Hanna, A. E. Aboutabl and M. S. M. Mostafa “Automated Software Testing Framework for Web Applications”, International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, 2018).
There are a lot of automated testing tools but now I want to focus on katalon and robot framework. They are built on the top of Selenium and can be used for web, mobile and web services automation. The interesting things is that both tools can be combined to create Fast Automated Testing which will be described later.
Although both those tools facilitate us to do automated testing, we need to have comparison of them so we can decide which tools that we need to use. An article “Comparison between Katalon Studio and Robot Framework” by Tay Sauching describes the detail comparison of those two tools from deployment, performance until test reporting. In that’s article, there two important point that caught me, those are:
Programming Skills / Easy to Use (Winner: Katalon)
Katalon allows the teams to get started with automation test quickly by reducing the effort and expertise required for learning and integrating these frameworks for automated testing needs. It provides GUI for the teams to do automated testing easily.
However, Robot Framework requires at least basic knowledge about programming skills since it doesn’t have any GUI by default. If you need to have GUI you can use RIDE which stand for Robot Framework Integrated Development Environment for easy test case adding and editing using Robot Framework.
Performance (Winner: Robot Framework)
Katalon Studio is a Groovy-based tool. It takes more time for compilation and execution of tests as it needs to load many libraries for parsing of test data, test objects, and logging etc. Meanwhile, Robot Framework is python based which is more lightweight, hence it has a better performance with more efficient compilation and test execution. In this case, Robot Framework gains this point.
Easy to Use or Performance ?
Since both of this point are important for me it comes to my mind to combine them for the better performance.
Pre-requirement:
- Chrome Browser
- Katalon Recorder on Chrome Extension
- Robot Framework
- Visual Code (or another IDE you can use for Robot Framework)
For test case, we can use https://coroo.github.io.
Step 1
Open your browser and Katalon Recorder. Then after pop-up Katalon Recorder shown, click Record Button to record new activity in your browser.
Step 2
Go to https://coroo.github.io. Enter your name and email in the first form, then click next button. Sometimes there will be a problem of some button not loaded yet. So, we need to define delay time for every transition form. For adding a delay time, you can easy click + button in Katalon Recorder and add command “Pause” with the value 1000 (for 1 second). Next you can continue to input street, city and state in second form and finish until third form. Last, you need to click “Stop” button for stop Katalon Recorder tracking your movement in browser.
Step 3
Yes! You already create the test case automation. How to run it then?
For running your test case, you can easily click “Play” button in Katalon Recorder then it will automatically running your test case.
Step 4
Now, since Robot Framework have better performance, we can use our test case before to be exported to Robot Framework. To do this, you can easily click “Export” button in Katalon Recorder. At the export test case as script tab, you can choose robot framework as the format. You can copy paste it to any IDE and save it with .robot extension, e.g. example.robot
Step 5
For running the robot framework, you need to open terminal and run it by:
robot example.robot
Conclusion
After all, both of each automated testing tools has their own advantages and disadvantages. Katalon has a better Programming Skills / Easy to Use for users since it has their own IDE and ease installation procedure rather than Robot Framework. While from performance perspective, Robot Framework using python which has more lightweight hence it has a better performance with more efficient compilation and test execution.
All of those tools has allowed us to adapt the automation of our testing of continually changing features, to check and increase the level of coverage with ease and to avoid accumulating legacy code. We realised that those two tools can be combined to create Fast Automated Testing.
Do you have experience of bringing order to what seemed a chaotic situation with tight time but still consider about performance, and have you managed to simplify life for yourself and your colleagues?
Tell us about it in the comments! :) Thanks for reading!
