Katalon Recorder 5.6: Smarter Test Execution with Dynamic Test Suites and Global Variables

Delivering quality at speed has become part of the quality assurance lexicon over the past few years. However, as manual work remains “unskippable” in different steps of our test cycles, the goal of running more tests in a shorter time might seem to be out of reach.

Today’s article will walk you through the latest features of Katalon Recorder 5.6 and explain how they help reduce manual efforts and shorten your next test cycles.

Speed Up Execution Time With Dynamic Test Suite

Imagine you are tasked to test a finance website that has recently released a new version of its Calculator with improvements and bug fixes. Out of the total 100 test cases, only five are involved in the Calculator function. What’s even trickier is that two of these five are also part of the Dashboard, yet they don’t belong to the same test suite.

Typically, you have to run all the test cases and test suites one by one. This practice is counter-intuitive as a large proportion of your tests are irrelevant to the new functionality. And, running all of them is, indeed, a waste of time.

Recorder 5.6 helps users execute selected test cases with specific tags, names, or properties through Dynamic Test Suites. Dynamic Test Suites are test suites that compute their test cases at run time using a user-provided query. 

Here’s what you can do with Dynamic Test Suite from Katalon Recorder 5.6 onwards:

• Add/remove tags from a particular test case in Test Case view or the context menu
• Add/remove/edit tags from multiple test cases in Tag Management view
• Create a Dynamic Test Suite and specify its query to filter test cases by tags
• Execute a Dynamic Test Suite that executes test cases filtered by its query

For detailed guidelines on how to categorize test cases with tags and execute them in Recorder’s Dynamic Test Suite, please refer to this document.

💡Did you know? Recorder 5.6 uses a simplified version of Dynamic Test Suite in Katalon Studio. Learn more about Studio’s Dynamic Test Suite here.

Minimize Maintenance Efforts and Syntax Complexity With Global Variables

In test automation, there are times when different test cases require the same sets of values. With many tools, however, users have to manually replicate and modify those similar data sets. As syntaxes and test projects become more complex over time, the accumulated effort of maintaining and managing tests will eventually lead to more stress and human errors.

Katalon Recorder 5.6 allows users to pre-define values and reuse them across all test cases with Global Variables. Users can now:

• Create a Profile in Test Explorer and add/delete/edit Global Variables in that Profile
• Determine different Profiles as default and run the same tests with different sets of values 
• Set existing values/variables in a test case as Global Variables and add them to a new or an existing Profile

For details on how to create and apply Global Variables in your tests, follow this step-by-step guide. 

💡 Did you know? Global variables in Katalon Recorder are also compatible with Studio. In Studio, Global Variables are defined within an artifact called Execution Profiles. 

Export Test Projects Seamlessly to Katalon Studio

At the beginning of the test automation journey, testing activities in small-sized teams usually revolve around developers or one dedicated QA engineer. That’s when most people would go for solutions like Katalon Recorder or Selenium IDE to kick-start test automation instantly and save as much infrastructure cost as possible.

Over time, teams might demand more than what their current tools offer, and things like complex retry logic or API testing become part of the daily conversations. In such scenarios, migrating to a more comprehensive testing framework, like Katalon Studio or Selenium WebDriver, is inevitable.

It goes without saying that an ideal migration should be fast, easy, and seamless. And to facilitate such a scenario, a given tool should satisfy both sides of the equation of easy to kick-start – able to accommodate future needs. 

In Recorder 5.6, instead of migrating individual test cases to Studio, users can now export large volumes of test cases, test suites, or an entire project to Studio. 

Users can zip multiple tests into a single file, download, and extract that file to Studio’s project folders. For other frameworks like Java Maven or Python, the user data is exported as a whole project.

Have a look at Katalon Recorder’s export scenarios to learn more. 

Test Smarter With Recorder 5.6

We’re thrilled to introduce Katalon Recorder 5.6 and all the new features that come along. Take advantage of them in your next tests, and as always, you’re encouraged to share with us your experience, concerns, and suggestions for our products at Katalon’s community forum.  

Happy reading, happy testing, and we hope Recorder 5.6 can become a trusted tool for smarter test execution.