Product Review: Katalon v. 5.3

Katalon: The Automation IDE done right!!

Dearest Reader, Testers, and Engineers, I wish to take this opportunity to break away from my normal day-to-day to introduce you to a new tool I've been working with this past month. Normally, this blog is dedicated to all things relevant to Information Security, but I feel I must share knowledge as I have acquired it.
**DISCLAIMER: The following product endorsement is done so freely and willingly. I was not asked to publish this, nor have I received any endorsement by the company or any of its affiliates.

Ok, so what is Katalon?

By-and-large, Katalon is a testing framework built off Selenium. It is an IDE that features all the necessary tools a QA Engineer / Automation Tester would need to build out a comprehensive end-to-end test harness. The language of choice is Groovy, but any JAVA syntax will work. With a few choice imports, one can employ JS as well.

How does it work?

Once you've downloaded Katalon, you are presented with a dashboard of features. The interface is really intuitive, and within minutes, you can easily build out a test.

What can it do for me?

If you are new to automation and are not sure where to start, Katalon provides a recorder that is similar in concept to Selenium's IDE. Simply launch the recorder and right away you can build out your first test. Once you are done recording, you can export your test case and build it up as needed.
Not sure how to acquire page objects? No problem. Katalon features a "Web Spy" utility which allows you to map an entire page with just a few mouse-clicks.
For more seasoned professionals, the framework offers tremendous flexibility with regards to testing APIs, testing mobile applications (native and web app), and web applications. You can customize testing with "custom keywords" to build out scripts in a maintainable, reusable fashion.
Tests can be run across a variety of web browsers. As a stand-alone script, or as part of a test suite. Tests can be run locally, or as part of a continuous integration system. But don't take my word for it, look into it yourself. There's so much more to the IDE than I can possibly cover.

Where can I get it?

Go to Katalon.com