When Katalon made the decision to run its own quality practice entirely on the Katalon platform, it wasn’t just a symbolic gesture. It was a deliberate business decision to replace fragmented tools, eliminate reporting silos, and sharpen product-market fit—all while holding itself to the same standards expected by our customers.
This is the inside story of how “Katalon on Katalon” began—and what executives can learn about the real return on investment (ROI) of platform consolidation.
From Fragmented Tool Chaos to Platform Clarity
As Katalon products were being built and we needed to rely on mature testing tools to ensure our products met minimum quality thresholds, our internal QE teams were juggling a messy toolchain:
- Automation: Selenium and Playwright (code-heavy, inconsistent adoption).
- Test Management: Jira, qTest, Xray, Qase and Google sheet (none integrated with automation).
- APIs & Performance: Postman, K6, JMeter, Lighthouse.
- Accessibility: Manual via browser tools or Axe plugins.
While functional, this stack came at a cost—test data was scattered, reporting was manual, and getting a clear view of release readiness often required more meetings than metrics.
“The lack of centralized reporting made it hard to track overall quality,” said Kara Nguyen, a QE lead at Katalon. “Xray, for example, wasn’t part of the ecosystem, so we couldn’t consolidate results from manual and automation runs.”
That changed when the team adopted Katalon Studio for automation and TestOps for test management. With a unified repository and execution pipeline, the team now operates out of a single pane of glass—covering manual tests, automation scripts, CI triggers, and Jira integration.
The ROI of Lowering the Skill Barrier
One of the biggest adoption blockers for previous tools was skill mismatch. Frameworks like Playwright and Selenium required coding proficiency, limiting automation to a few specialized testers.
Katalon Studio removed that barrier.
“Studio’s UI lets non-coders write and manage automation,” said Nguyen. “It broadened participation across the team.”
This wasn’t just a usability win—it changed how teams operated. With more testers contributing to automation, coverage expanded, and regression execution no longer bottlenecked behind a few automation leads.
Combined with TestOps’ shared dashboards and Jira sync, this meant everyone—from QEs to designers to Engineering Managers—had visibility and ownership across quality cycles.
Integrated Reporting Cuts Through the Noise
Executives don’t want status updates—they want answers. Before adopting Katalon, status meetings often revolved around interpreting conflicting reports from Xray, Jira, and various automation frameworks.
Now, teams use TestOps dashboards to:
- Track user stories pulled directly from Jira.
- Assign tests per team within each product room.
- Monitor test runs—manual or automated—alongside AI-generated test suggestions.
- Collect internal feedback through Usersnap, with over 108 suggestions submitted and being implemented
This centralization of data—previously stitched together manually—is now the operating system for QE at Katalon. Release decisions are no longer gut calls—they’re supported by traceability, real-time coverage data, and flakiness tracking.
Internal Use Becomes a Product Accelerator
Unlike many vendors that keep their engineering orgs isolated from their commercial tools, Katalon deliberately adopted an “only use Katalon” policy internally—even when that meant some growing pains.
For instance, when manual test tracking wasn’t yet mature in TestOps, the team found a workaround: storing manual test artifacts alongside automation scripts to retain a single source of truth. This friction was exactly what the product team needed to prioritize native manual test support in Gen 3.
“We made a conscious decision to not buy other tools,” said Mushahid Honda, VP of Professional Services. “We used the constraint to expose weak areas and improve them.”
That’s not just operational integrity—it’s product validation.
The Strategic Benefits of Going All-In
By consolidating onto its own platform, Katalon gained more than cost savings. Here are the executive-level benefits:
- Simplified Training & Rotation: One toolset meant easier onboarding and faster team transfers across products, without retraining.
- Better Regression Efficiency: Test artifacts are reusable across teams, enabling broader coverage with fewer resources.
- Consistent Quality Benchmarks: Whether testing Studio, TestOps, or AI features, every team uses the same metrics and reporting framework.
- Credibility in Market: Sales teams now point to real, internal usage metrics—“We ran 2,000 tests across browsers in 45 minutes”—instead of relying on generic claims.
Perhaps most importantly, this internal story lends credibility when customers ask: “Do you use your own tools?”
Yes. Every day.
Final Word: What Leaders Should Ask Themselves
If your teams are still managing test data in a dozen places, or if automation is bottlenecked behind a few experts, it’s time to ask:
- What’s the cost of maintaining fragmented tools?
- How much time do we waste stitching reports?
- Are we learning from our own practice the way our vendors claim to?
Katalon’s internal transformation is a playbook that starts by drinking its own champagne.
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