Katalon Testing Suite
I've always been attracted to low-code, no-code (preferably) automation test suites, probably because I never really got on with coding. Oh, I've dabbled over the years. I've written "Hello World" in quite a few languages, and actually made progress with Python — in that I completed all the exercises in the course I was following along with and wrote one or two useful scripts, and I also enjoy SQL and HTML. However, when it comes to testing, automation trumps manual in the job market. Subtle arguments about how the "testing mentality" is lost when coding a test suite cut little ice with people concerned with speed and repetition. I have known many would-be testers leave testing — or decide against going into it — because coding seemed the only way forward in terms of career path, and they weren't temperamentally suited to coding.
There are quite a few low-code, no-code suites, on the market, and they've promised a lot of over the years without ever fully being able to deliver in a world of business bespoke software. I asked Copilot to give me a top ten list of low-code, no-code automation test suites and it returned the following:
To be frank, I've heard of the top two on that list and Ranorex at No 6. And I was surprised that TestComplete (from SmartBear) wasn't on the list, perhaps because I've seen a lot of marketing for it and it behaves very like Katalon.
Anyway, to our Katalon tale. I've had a few looks at Katalon over the years, and done quite a few proof-of-concept tests, and I also liked the fact it had a Linux client. I have to say that it now seems to have reached a surprising (to me anyway) level of maturity. As an aside, I also had an interviewee who sang its praises untroubled by the fact we weren't using it. I sincerely hope she's working in automation using Katalon and is still enthusiastically advocating for it. She was really passionate about it, and I remember wishing at the time that we'd gone down that route.
I downloaded the latest free version to follow along with Raghav Pal's Katalon masterclass, which can be found here:
And very good it is, too. The suite and the masterclass. He does lots of training stuff, and if you have the time to follow along and actually do the training as opposed to just watching the video, you will learn a very great deal. And so there I was with Katalon and Raghav following along assiduously, when I hit this error (or limitation):
I understand. I truly do. This is an application intended for use in businesses, and they don't want to give everything away for free, which is perfectly reasonable. I was just a mite miffed because I was caught up in the flow of the training and it was a bump in the road.
I now know how to do the following in Katalon: create test cases using three different methods; create a test suite and add test cases to it; create a test collection and add test suites to it. And, of course, I cheerfully ran the tests and watched them complete. I looked at the reporting, which is impressive (businesses love reporting) and I looked at scripting which Raghav made it easy to follow along with. Despite this, I know there is much, much more to this suite than what I've learned. Everything I've learned is confined to web applications, which are increasingly common these days. But Katalon also does mobile applications and, I believe, desktop applications. I used to test desktop applications exclusively, but that was before the world changed, and I have no experience testing mobile applications beyond using browser simulations of various mobile phones.
Past real-world problems: Imagine you have a piece of software in which you have to create a list of items, but the snag is that all the items have to have unique names. So you record yourself adding the first item. You go to the URL, you enter the login name and password, you take the steps to add the item, and then you close the browser and save the test. When you run the test, it will fail because the name has already been added and the name has to be unique. I know a coder using the Selenium webdriver (and coding in C#) who solves this problem by simply adding the date and time to the item, thereby making them unique. I wresttled with this in Katalon, and got it working, but would have to remind myself how to do it.
You can learn a lot with the free version, but not everything. If you don't use it in your job, you will have to revisit it from time to time to keep what you've learned fresh. It's also a good idea to keep generally abreast of the direction of travel in testing, since it's a fast-moving target.
Opportunities:
Job roles are becoming increasingly specialist, including testing job roles. The day of the charming generalist sadly belongs to yester-year. We used to work in IT, doing a bit of everything as our skills and inclinations took us. Installing software, fixing computers, helping someone having a problem with their hardware, creating and cloning virtual machines, a batch command here, a script there, a select statement here, a manual test there. Now all these things have their particular lanes and boxes, and the rest of it — such as my enjoyment of Linux on the desktop — is in the hobbyist arena.
Employers now want and advertise for a very specific set of skills and tools. I saw one job advert that said "Knowledge of Appium essential". Essential. This was in a long list of other desired skills. Basically, though, don't bother applying if you don't know Appium. Appium's a tool for testing mobile apps on Android and IOS; I knew of it without having used it, so I didn't apply despite the rest of the skill set being on point.
On the plus side, mastery of a particular tool, such as Katalon or any in vogue tool, would pretty much guarantee a decent income. And there are people who invest a lot of time trying to divine the next big thing in their arena. In testing, I've heard Playwright and Cypress are currently fashionable and battling for corporate space.
I would say, though, that I worry about the increasing specialisation of job specs because it doesn't allow for transferable skills. Let's be frank: if you can use one office suite you can pretty much use them all; and if you can write an automated test suite with Katalon, Test Complete is not going to be too much of a stretch. But we live in an age of keyword matching and people wanted more for their drop-in toolset rather than their ability to think and adapt, which is — in my humble opinion — something of a shame.