Katalon Studio 6.3.0 Offers Two Nice Features

Earlier I wrote about adopting Katalon Studio for UI Tests, and as my journey with Katalon continues, they continue to improve the desktop application.  Katalon Studio 6.3.0 features two nice enhancements when the Beta was released on July 3, 2019.  The release is presently downloadable in beta format via GitHub (click prerelease to download).  This beta release has several bug fixes, but let’s get down to brass tax – this release includes two really nice features that anyone who uses Katalon will love:

Feature 1: Dark Theme

  To enable Dark Theme go to Themes and select Dark. 

Once you select a new theme, the app asks for permission to restart. After the restart, dark theme in all of it’s glory appears. 

Feature Two: Improved Profile Management

One of the pain points for me was managing Profiles – the only way to rearrange information in profiles has been to do so in the script view, which is quite tedious when managing multiple profiles with tens of variables. Beginning in v6.3.0, Katalon makes this easier.   

Now you can highlight the variable and select move up or move down and organize your profiles in a way that makes finding profiles names simple, instead of searching through an unorganized set of variables, I’ll alphabetize my list for quick searching:

The old view when adding values: 

The new and improved view, while imperfect, makes it easier to view – and, if you’re editing in script mode, you can begin typing url_ and it will start to autocomplete.  This alone makes the organization worth it (as opposed to guessing what the url could be since before the naming convention might have been something like portal_user_admin_with_some_caveat. 

Final Words on Katalon Studio 6.3 Features

I’m really satisfied with these two Katalon Studio 6.3.0 Features enhancements.  This free tool is already a really good test automation tool that every tester should have in their tool box.  I encountered one issue –  when I renamed the profile variables, the variables didn’t get updated in all of the tests, resulting in a slew of failing tests.  However, it’s important enough to me to go ahead and get these variables in a sorted order that I’m going to take time to fix this – perhaps in the next release the team at Katalon will resolve this issue too.