Add Katalon Visual Testing to your Robot Framework Automations

Robot Automation Framework is a popular open source test automation tool employed by software teams. Katalon’s Robot Framework Integration enables software teams using Robot Framework for test automation to tap into Katalon’s powerful AI enabled Visual Testing capabilities to level up their software quality and release readiness protocols.  

The Value of Visual Testing

Modern businesses depend on digital experiences for both customers and business users. Modern test automation helps to validate functionality within these digital experiences, but validating the UI and UX continues to be an intense process of:

• Manually, or through automation, capturing images 
• Manually, or through partial automation, comparing for differences  

While tedious and time-consuming, failure to include visual testing as part of your quality processes could lead to:

• Bad first impressions due to variations or broken UI layouts, such as buttons and/or text that are accidentally displaced
• Loss of sales given limited or no usable UI Interactions due to non-visible elements on pages that functional automation tests cannot assert
• Frustration or anger triggered by improper use of language that somehow slipped through various review rounds, etc.

All of these are actual problems that have impacted businesses in real life, resulting in thousands or millions of dollars in lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction, and negative brand image.

Katalon Visual Testing

Katalon’s Visual Testing solution provides AI-Powered Visual Testing capabilities that allow users to validate software UI in a reliable and automated way with different comparison models to fit the need.

Katalon Visual Testing can perform three distinct types of comparisons to address the specific needs of your UI validations:

• Pixel Comparison to validate exact matches of UI.
• Content Comparison that focuses on the accuracy of text content when its accuracy is most important.
• Layout Comparison for validating that the relative position of images, objects, and other visual elements are not impacted so as to change the overall appearance of the UI.

Visual Testing is easy to add to existing Katalon Studio tests and we’re extending this ease of use to Robot Testing Framework users with this integration.

You can learn more about Katalon’s AI-Powered Visual Testing solution here

Robot Framework and Katalon Visual Testing Integration

Katalon has published a python based integration package on Pypi (https://pypi.org/project/testops-robot/). The TestOps-Robot package enables Robot Framework to leverage API’s for TestOps to allow uploads of baseline and checkpoint images and return results of the visual comparisons.  

The image below describes the events flowing between Robot Framework and TestOps during execution.

Using the integration, users can easily add steps to existing test automations to make calls to TestOps for initiating visual comparison tests based on uploaded baseline and checkpoint images. Results are passed back to the Robot Framework automation using the integration.

Result in Robot Framework test

And checkpoint images as well as comparison results can be viewed in TestOps.

Visual Test Result in TestOps:

Get started with Visual Testing and Robot Framework

Visual Testing is a key component of modern software quality processes. Making sure business users and customers are seeing and interacting with the UI as it is intended is not always guaranteed through automated testing.

For a complete and up-to-date guide on integrating Robot Framework with Katalon Visual Testing check our documentation here: https://docs.katalon.com/docs/analyze/analytics/visual-testing/robot-framework-integration-with-visual-testing

And for a peek at how the integration looks in a project, you can check out our public example project on GitHub here: https://github.com/katalon-studio-samples/katalon-testops-robot-sample