Katalon Studio: What You Need To Know About Tests Explorer
Katalon Studio has a lot of helpful features that you can use for creating automation. For you as a beginner that wants to create automation without struggling with coding, you can create automation using Katalon Studio record and playback features that have very easy and simple steps to learn.
There are some features that you need to know before starting to build your first automation using Katalon Studio, let’s start with the Tests Explorer section.
- Profiles help cover multiple and different environments to execute your automation test scripts with ease. You can configure the testing environment in terms of data and behaviors through Global variables. To know how to use this feature you can watch this video:
2. Test Cases are actions and validations and are also reusable and parameterized. You can not only run the single test case but also can call the test case from another test case. For example, you are creating E2E test case and you need a login step inside the test case. You can call the login test case into the E2E test case so the E2E test case will look more shortly and easy to read. To know how to use this feature you can watch this video:
3. Object Repository is a collection to maintain the object that you want to use to build automation. Manage your object repository as well as possible. You can separate your object per page or maybe per feature, and also don’t forget to be consistent for naming your object so if you want to reuse the object, it will be easy for you to find it. Here is how I maintain and name my object repository:
4. Test Suites is a collection of multiple different or duplicate test cases. Same with the Object Repository, you can manage your Test Suite by separating it per page or per feature (it depends on the style you or your team want to choose). And also notes that one test case can be duplicated in the same Test Suite. Below is the example of the Login Test Suite:
5. Data Files is a collection of data files such as CSV or XLS files that contain variables and values that want to be called in your test cases, especially when you are working on data-driven testing. Check the simple way how to use some data from excel using Data Files features:
6. Checkpoints are the snapshot of test data taken at a specific time. A checkpoint is used to verify whether the current state of the data source is different from its previous taken state. An example where Checkpoints proves to be helpful in database validation cases where value usually changes constantly.
7. Keywords are methods or functions as a building block that are called in your test cases. Besides the keyword already provided by Katalon, you also be able to create your own keywords. Once created, custom keywords can be used when implementing test cases, just like the general keyword that Katalon provides. For more about keywords, you can read my article that talks in more detail about keywords in Katalon here.
8. Test Listeners is used when you want to specify actions that must be run before (SetUp) and after each run of your test cases or test suite (TearDown). Automation testers usually want to specify prerequisite and clean-up configurations for their test cases. With the prerequisite configuration, the test engine must take specific actions before starting test execution. For clean-up configuration, the test engine must carry out some actions after the test execution finishes. The detail about Test Listeners:
9. Reports are automatically generated after you finish running the test suite. The report is not generated if you run the single test case, so if you want to get the report automatically generated, you need to create a test suite to run your test cases. The folder and report name will be named as the date and time you run the test suite. Here is the example:
Remember that Test Suite Collection Report is only available for Katalon Studio Enterprise users. But I will give you a trick on how to see your test suite report using Katalon Studio free users:
- On the report file, right-click until the pop-up is displayed.
- Then choose export as HTML, CSV (Summary or Details), or PDF.
10. TestOps provides dashboards and reports on the status of product quality. With Katalon TestOps, you can coordinate various activities, cycles, and frameworks in software testing. By doing so, you can ensure software quality at every stage without the need to sacrifice speed or require DevOps expertise. More details about Katalon TestOps:
11. Include. Features File is located within the ‘Include/’features’ folder from your project folder and can be seen from Tests Explorer section. The content of the Features File will follow BDD conventions (Given, When, Then). When creating a new Features File, there will be an option to ‘Generate sample Feature template’ which will generate a sample template for your Features File. This will ensure that the created Features File matches with the BDD convention so that you will reduce efforts in creating Features File in the correct format.
12. Plugins folder is intended to be used in custom keyword plugin development. You can place your plug-in jar file there and reload the project to test the custom keyword. The location of the installed plug-ins from Store is at Preference > Katalon > Plugins.
Or you can find many plugins published on Katalon Store, which are developed by the Katalon team or the community user.
So, that’s all you need to know about Katalon Studio - Tests Explorer part.
In the next article, let’s discuss more about “What You Need To Know” with another part.
Stay tuned! 🤖
