Introduction To Karate – A Unified Framework for API test-automation, mocks, performance-testing, and UI automation

Introduction

Sometimes I think that a Tester must need to know to code to write better automated test scripts. We have a good number of tools that require a good amount of coding such as Selenium, Protractor, Cypress, Rest Assured, etc. There are some tools that require less coding but for better assertions and extension of framework, we need to add external libraries.

We develop any framework keeping in mind that it must be easy to use and provides many capabilities. Just for an example – If we are developing a UI framework using Selenium WebDriver we should keep below points in mind:-

1. Overloaded Keywords to perform actions like click, type etc.
2. Inbuilt support for reporting
3. Utilities to read data from various external sources
4. Database connection utils
5. Parallel execution
6. Cross-browser testing
7. Custom assertions

There are many more. The only purpose is to make it easier to use and just call methods to perform actions.

There is an open-source framework that makes life easier for Test Automation professionals – Karate – Test Automation Made simple.

Karate Framework

Karate framework is developed by Peter Thomas employed at Intuit. As per GitHub page of Karate Framework – Karate is the only open-source tool to combine API test-automation, mocks, performance-testing, and even UI automation into a single, unified framework.

Behavior-driven development (BDD) is an Agile software development process that focuses on collaborative development by keeping everyone on the same page of understanding. Karate framework has used this concept well and made it easy to use for any non-programmers as well.

Features of Karate Framework

1. Open-source
2. Supports API Test automation, UI test automation, Performance testing, and mocking
3. Supports REST, SOAP API and GraphQL
4. Uses BDD syntax i.e. Test are written in a Gherkin format
5. There is no need to write any step definitions
6. The official page of the Karate framework says that Java knowledge is not required but I will say you need to have basic knowledge of Java with build tools knowledge such as maven or Gradle.
7. We just need to write simple plain scripts in a feature file with keywords and no need to write step definitions.
8. No compilation needed
9. Elegant DSL syntaxes with JsonPath and XmlPath support
10. Powerful assertions for JSON and XML
11. Fully featured debugger
12. Easy validation of payload structure
13. Supports data-driven testing
14. Supports tagging and grouping of tests
15. Built-in support for switching configuration across different environments (e.g. dev, QA, pre-prod)
16. Supports seamless integration with CICD and Git
17. Supports Junit 4 and Junit 5
18. Parallel execution
19. Support reading of CSV and Yaml files
20. Built-in test reports and easy integration with maven plugin for a much better report
21. Supports cross-browser web UI automation testing
22. Supports dekstop automation
23. Integration with Gatling – A tool for performance testing
24. Mocking of API
25. Embedded JavaScript engine that allows you to build a library of re-usable functions that suit your specific environment or organization
26. Inbuilt retry mechanism
27. Supports hooks

I understand Karate Framework is a kind of keyword-driven framework where every action has a keyword and we just need to call that keyword.

This is just an introduction post about Karate Framework and it will be followed by a series of detailed posts covering each concept of the Karate framework.

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