Imagine if your software development team could use one simple testing tool having artificial intelligence to shorten delivery cycles, improve customer experience, update new features regularly and ramp up DevOps with best practices.

What if we could share some insights on the growing trend of artificial intelligence in software testing. And how we used an AI plugin with a testing tool for one of our customers to automate functionality in less than a day. All this can be done having a basic knowledge of a programming language and testing of UI and API both on the web and mobile. Businesses can even optimize resource allocation using this single tool for both web and mobile automation.

You would be pumped to witness how artificial intelligence can revolutionize your software testing.

In this blog, we are going to share an insightful piece on how artificial intelligence will change the future of the testing in SDLC. And we have used a new-age testing tool Katalon, describing how it will create this impact in your business.

Testing Trends Using New Age Technologies

In an evolving digital age, competitors don’t cease to grow. Every business, regardless of the industry vertical, is customer-obsessed. Companies are forced to transform and innovate faster than before. According to a Forrester report, the potential ROI of speed and faster release results in a revenue impact of improving customer experience.

Shorter delivery cycles, improved customer experience, new regular features, ramped up DevOps teams with best practices in development processes have become the need of the hour. Artificial intelligence, agile development, CI/CD pipeline, continuous API testing, UI Testing, and DevOps initiatives, single framework testing are not buzzwords anymore. Rather, these are the heart of an enterprises’ agile application development & delivery team.

Test Smarter, Not Harder – Artificial Intelligence in Continuous Testing

Artificial intelligence has witnessed a significant maturity as a powerful technology with unending business applications. According to a 2019 survey, consisting of global data and analytics decision-makers, 53% have implemented or are in the process of upgrading their business systems implementing some form of artificial intelligence.

We have all come to terms to believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) does have potential benefits and threats as well. Combining natural intelligence with machine learning, and its innate ability to scale, artificial intelligence can be integrated into development teams, automating mundane tasks while boosting human capacity with new insight.

As software testing and open source tools continue to evolve, traditional processes no longer suffice. DevOps and agile initiatives have become the de facto model in accelerated software delivery. AI-based testing will open new opportunities for development and delivery teams to address challenges like lag in automation testing, maintenance of API and unit test generation, minimizing the complexity in SDLC, reduce taxing and manual efforts in testing.

In this blog, we will walk you through one of a new-age testing tool – Katalon. If you are a project manager, QA Manager, a part of the agile team with quality assurance, developers and testers looking to apply artificial intelligence in testing, this blog is for you.

What is Katalon?

Katalon is a power-packed automation testing tool developed by Katalon LLC. It is named as one of the most emerging and robust testing tools. In addition to Selenium, Ranorex and Apache JMeter, testing engineers choose Katalon for its specialized IDE interface for all  Ui Testing, API Testing for both web and mobile applications also testing of Desktop apps. This tool is versatile, user-friendly and license-free. It can be launched on any Microsoft, Windows, Mac OS and Linux devices.

Katalon has a dual scripting interface that allows the tool to have wider adoption & integration among users and brings in easy deployment as compared to Selenium. It is ideal for all various types of testers and being a cross-browser tool, supports web, mobile and API testing which goes with analytics and recording modules.

Why should businesses use Katalon Studio in Continuous Software Testing?

Integration with CI/DevOps: Katalon is compatible with multiple tools used in continuous integrations & developments. It is integrated with cloud CI tools like Travis CI, Sauce Labs, Selenium Grid, Kobiton, and many more.

Smart Analytics Dashboard & Reports: The automation testing tool allows users to analyze tests based on a recorded scenario with its inbuilt data-driven testing modules. Katalon Studio displays analytic results in built-in reports with easy export in PDF, HTML, EXCEL or CSV. The generated reports are visually smarter and simple to use.

Support Several Testing Types: Katalon supports multiple testing types. These include:

1. Keyword Driven: Testers with minimum scripting proficiency can use keywords that represent users’ actions on the AUT (Application Under Test) and can execute test automation easily. The keywords in this type of test can also be customized.

2. Data-Driven: In data-driven testing, data is sourced from data pools like Excel files, CSV files, ADO objects and then test is executed by reading test scripts from such data sources.

3. API Testing: API testing is used for better test coverage. In Katalon, API testing supports XML data sources, XLS, and databases with dynamic mapping. It also supports BDD Cucumber.

4. Cross Browser: Katalon supports all the popular browsers used like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, headless, and custom environments.

5. Gamut of Toolset and Integration: This comes with ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) integration, framework, and plugins with easy installation on Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Therefore, Katalon doesn’t require any additional integration to run a test. Katalon supports parallel execution and can be adjusted to any framework. This can also be integrated with GitHub and Jenkins.

6. User-friendly Graphical User Interface: Katalon offers rich graphics with tables, tree views, and menus allowing a user to manage test artifacts easily. Testers find the interface, convenient, clean, user-friendly and easy to grasp.

Making Katalon Testing Smarter with AI-based Plug-ins

As we now already know, Katalon is highly versatile and extensible. There are AI-based plug-ins that make AI testing possible. There are two such plug-ins for UI Testing of mobile or web applications that make the tool think smartly and perform efficiently.

1. Auto Healing Smart Path: The Auto Healing Smart Path plug-in is basically used in UI Testing to help find the xpath while executing the automation suite. Suppose you have created an automation suite. After a few months, due to enhancements, the xpath of a few of the objects change. The suite will fail due to the absence of the specific object in the xpath file. When you turn on the feature of this plug-in, then the tool tries to find and select the next suitable xpath from the list. Thus, resulting in the execution of the automation suite without any interruption. This AI plugin helps in saving crucial time from updating the automation suite after every change in the UI and also when the execution is done in batches overnight.
2. Applitools: The Applitools plugin is a powerful visual comparison tool that applies artificial intelligence to help verify the layout of web applications, websites and mobile devices. Through cross-browser testing in Katalon, we can take automated screenshots across hundreds of browsers and once done, then have Applitools to analyze the differences.

Few of the salient features of Applitools Integration Plug-in are:

• Single-step full browser and element image comparison.
• Advanced and optimized checking options in scripting mode.
• Configurable multiple viewports checking without changing code.
• Single test cross-environment testing.

Applitool can be mostly used for mobile devices having multiple screen resolutions & screen size. It is not feasible for testers to test the application on all types of devices. This plugin can help in UI testing whenever changes are made in the application. Even the smallest change works on the elements of the page.

The above-stated plugins increase the efficiency of Katalon and make it more robust in the AI space. The future is a machine and the central nervous system to the machine is artificial intelligence. So, Katalon as a testing tool with artificial intelligence has a great future prospect in automation making it an easier, effective and efficient tool.

Xoriant Katalon Testing for a Client

One of our client’s critical requirement was form submissions. The application software was available on multiple devices both on the web and on mobile (Android and iOS). As there were large scale form submissions, there was a need to validate the performance of the API responses on different screen resolutions and versions. The logic flow of the application included form creation on the web and its submission from the mobile. This needed two different software one for API Testing and another for Mobile Testing.

Xoriant engineering team used JMeter tool for performance of API and SOAP UI for mobile. Katalon was used to test the application on the web, mobile and API. The user-friendly framework was used to test the application on different screen resolutions, with easy integration of the automation code. Using Katalon, form designing on web and submission on mobile executed in one single flow while performing testing.

Benefits of Xoriant Testing Services

As a trusted partner, your business can leverage the assured benefits of Xoriant’s testing services. In an age governed by faster deployments and DevOps transformation, our skilled engineering team, with testing automation frameworks, can accelerate the testing cycle and reduce overheads while delivering superior quality governance.

Talk to our experts to achieve 100% test coverage and how you can leverage artificial intelligence in your software development lifecycle.

References

https://www.katalon.com

http://automated-360.com/katalon-studio/katalon-key-features/