Migrating your Current Selenium Tests to Katalon Studio | A Further Step in Codeless Test Automation
Selenium is considered the household name when it comes to the test automation tool market. Many organizations and testers have extolled the virtues of Selenium as the standard automation framework for web applications – from simply writing a script to checking how the webpage loads, to mimicking a real user interacting with a website.
However, the major downside of Selenium lies in stimulating growth for teams as it requires substantial time, labor expertise, and resources to do the challenging tasks. Meanwhile, the rising era of DevOps and Agile development practices have ushered QA teams to more rapid releases but still maintain high-quality outputs. Thus there is an increasing demand for more robust tools with multiple and advanced features.
Where is Selenium in an Entire Software Testing Landscape?
Selenium is an open-source tool designed to automate the tests carried out on web browsers. With a history tracing from the humble beginnings of IDE, Selenium Grid, Client API until WebDriver transformation, Selenium laid a solid foundation of countless software test automation tools these days due to flexible testing on various levels. A significant benefit of Selenium WebDriver is the multilingual support with all the programming languages that testers should know, including Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP.
Challenges of Testing in Selenium
- Highly technical expertise is necessary
Although the flexibility Selenium provides almost matches all major browsers with a driver for each, it requires highly technical expertise to manually configure test scripts on operating systems, involving Microsoft Windows, Apple OS, and Linux.
Therefore, building projects with Selenium is a double-edged sword. Above, I mentioned the abundance of programming languages supported by Selenium. The challenge here is that not every user possesses professional technical skill sets to customize and maintain those projects to fit product development.
- Testing coverage is limited
Although Selenium has grown into a full-blown Automation framework with an array of essential features, it solely serves the web testing purpose. A third-party tool is necessary for mobile, API, or desktop application testing with extra time and effort spent along the way.
“Quality at Speed” is a new norm in software development where testers and QA professionals are pushing into the DevOps/Agile model intending to stay ahead of the game and increase the velocity in delivering value to clients. In other words, the more comprehensive the tool’s simple configuration is, the more rapid the teams can push quality testing upstream.
- Users are moving towards AI-driven and image-based testing
AI testing is believed to be the further step in applying computer algorithms and elements such as image-based testing, AI/ML, and scalability capabilities to solve more complex user behavior over time. To do this in Selenium, you need a third-party AI-driven software that enables testing in the cloud, handles dynamic content and self-healing locators for all UI elements, thus considerably simplifying test maintenance.
Moreover, Selenium couldn’t capture images for visual testing by default. Simultaneously, many Selenium alternatives (e.g., UFT, TestComplete, Sikuli) are equipped with built-in elements to do that based on the pixel-to-pixel comparison. To be specific, checking the size, font, layout, color, and UI themes, complicated charts, and dashboards, especially updating regular UI changes, speeds up the UI testing process.
- Insufficient professional support
Being an open-source means seeking a solution to your uncommon Selenium issues or custom requests is feasible but difficult. In case of need, there is a wide array of online tutorials, questions, answers, and consultation where you can ask the community for help. However, it’s not reliable help from developers, just from the tool’s users that depend entirely on each other to receive usage guidance.
Here Comes Katalon Studio to Handle Selenium Tests
Nevertheless, the major challenge in the Selenium framework is a massive investment in designing the automation framework, which takes considerable time, effort, and highly technical skill sets. Then what other options do we have in modern test automation models these days?
Then Katalon Studio joined the game to revolutionize the way software testers use Selenium and Appium with a complete test automation framework. Thanks to the release of version 7.4.0, Katalon Studio allows you to migrate your Selenium tests in either TestNG or JUnit framework to Katalon Studio, without coding all over again. You may wonder how the new feature release can enhance user experience to the fullest.
- Broader coverage of platforms and operating systems
Even though it is equipped with several pre-installed templates, Katalon Studio is still famous for its simple setup and usage. Overall, newcomers only need a mild learning curve to generate automation test scripts efficiently.
This platform facilitates test automation for web, mobile, API, and desktop testing no matter which operating system, either Windows, macOS, or Linux. Even beginners manage to execute test projects quickly without advanced programming expertise. For professional users, hundreds of custom keywords, advanced features such as auto-healing, and Smart Wait make it easy for them to customize advanced test scripts.
Overall, Katalon Studio is considered as an evolving solution with many integrations that cover an array of testing types and testing platforms in a single multifacet tool.
- CI/CD integration and testing performed entirely in the cloud
Katalon Studio is a complete automated testing solution with built-in Continuous Delivery/Continuous Integration and DevOps integrations. That becomes a competitive advantage for Katalon to carry out continuous testing in the cloud compared to Selenium.
Furthermore, native integration plugins such as Jenkins, Bamboo, CircleCI, Azure DevOps, and integrations for execution platforms, involving SauceLabs, LambdaTest, Kobiton, and BrowserStack, deliver more enjoyable user experience when automating projects at scale.
- Achieve automation success with minimal investment possible
The flexible adaptability of Katalon Studio can address the issue on time to enhance smooth collaboration among team members while keeping abreast of all project executions.
More importantly, Katalon TestOps automatically deliver results in visual charts and dashboards as soon as tests complete in the cloud. Hence, Katalon users can get a big picture of test data analytics throughout the project, consequently arrange test planning flexibly.
How to Migrate Selenium Tests to Katalon Studio
Testers will find the tool easy to move existing Selenium test scripts forward and backward while still retaining them with comprehensive features. Just in a few steps, you can enjoy your Selenium tests with Katalon Studio’s codeless mechanism:
Step 1: Select the Selenium project of your choice to migrate.
Note: You may need to add Java dependencies of your project to .gradle file.
Step 2: Copy and paste the source code of the selected project to Katalon Studio.
Step 3: Well-done! Now you can execute and expand your Selenium tests with Katalon.
Read more for the full tutorial and sample project.
Some Frequently Asked Questions for your reference before making any decision:
1. Can I continue developing Selenium scripts after integrating with Katalon, and re-migrate back to Selenium?
Yes. Selenium test scripts after migrating to Katalon can be customized with Katalon’s comprehensive capabilities.
If you are a Selenium lover and would rather keep using it for more advanced improvement, it’s possible to re-migrate tests from Katalon Studio back to Selenium.
2. There are too many tutorials, I don’t know where to start with Katalon Studio after the migration?
You can refer to a quick guide to set up and start your first automation test with Katalon Studio with the least amount of effort.
For further requests, please visit our Help Center for ticket submission or ask the Katalon community for help.
3. There are both new and experienced testers in my team, then can we use Katalon Studio features effectively?
Katalon Studio is structured for teams at no matter which scale or level that even manual testers can quickly tailor to any automation testing demands using the record & playback feature. For more professional testers, test cases can be adjusted flexibly via the Scripting Mode with hundreds of built-in custom keywords.
4. Are on-demand demos always available to show how this feature works with my current Selenium tests?
Absolutely! Katalon Sales team will give you instructions thoroughly using the tool’s capabilities and why our solutions are suitable for your projects in just a 30-min call.
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