Introducing Karate’s Core Concepts

The software testing world is constantly changing. Technologies that were recently state of the art are replaced or turn out to be slow sellers. New frameworks are created all the time to try to solve common testing problems. There are a lot of people who have entrenched opinions about how tests should look, and sometimes this attitude can even block progress. Testing is often still divided into exploratory testing (also called manual testing, which I personally dislike) and code-heavy automation solutions (also known as test automation), which may require a software expert for development and maintenance but might not be feasible for more hands-on exploratory testing.

In between these extremes, there is plenty of room for innovation. There has been quite some progress here during the last few years, and these new technological solutions are in high demand.

The Karate framework is a rather new contender in the software testing field that has set out to solve many of the problems raised, especially the steep learning curve of other solutions.

We are going to cover the following topics:

• What makes Karate stand out?
• Behavior-driven development (BDD) versus Karate
• Supported data types in Karate
• The JavaScript engine
• Java interoperability