Katalon for UI tests

[dan.b (Dan)]

Hi
my company uses Katalon for UI testing (a commercial product, based on Selenium/Java).
We currently execute tests manually but would like to incorporate them into the CD process, to reduce the time between deployments to SIT and testing starting.
Has anyone done anything with Katalon before or be able to share any advice please?
In Azure DevOps there is a specific plugin for integration, I don’t see anything available as a pre-built step but am I right in thinking that UI tests (eg Java Selenium) are possible?
Many thanks
Dan

[mark.reeder]

Hi @dan.b,

Welcome to the community!

I haven’t personally used Katalon before, but have done similar things previously. Basically, as long as the target you want to test against has the tools installed or available via a worker, you can kick off a test using a Run a Script step. With just a cursory glance at Katalon, it looks like this would be the Katalon Runtime Engine you would need to call into from the Run a Script step in order to kick off tests.

We blogged about a similar process using Cypress here. Skipping all the Cypress specifics, you can see it’s using the Run a Script step to kick off the tests within a docker container, but could just as easily be an installed tool as mentioned previously in that blog post. You might even be able to use a docker container as well for your dependencies as it looks like Katalon provides a docker image to use.

We also have a Slack community which you can try to see if any other customers out there might be using Katalon.

I hope this helps!

Mark

[dan.b (Dan)]

Hi Mark

thanks a lot, that’s tremendously helpful.
Having a quick look at Run a Script step it seems that it allows useful features like passing parameters and collecting artifacts (eg test reports perhaps).
We will be using KRE but yet to answer some of the other questions, like whether Docker is required - this gives me somewhere to start though!
Thanks again,
Dan