Selenium Webdriver (Selenium) is no doubt the leading web testing automation framework that is most popular and familiarized with the testing community.  One of the most common features of Selenium is Wait command. However, this powerful feature comes along with a big problem with timing due to front-end processing. 

Starting from version 7.0.0, Katalon Studio has introduced the Smart Wait feature that helps users handle Selenium wait issues without any additional test scripts. This blog will provide you more insights into Selenium’s most common issue and how Katalon Studio solves this problem. 

Download Katalon Studio 7 at www.katalon.com

Selenium’s most common flaw: Timing Issue

With the Selenium framework, Javascript and Ajax front end technologies are most commonly used for web application development. However, there are still drawbacks to these two techniques. After the web page has been loaded by the browser, the point at which all page elements are ready for interacting is typically unpredictable. 

For instance, you can easily run into these scenarios:

• Elements have not been rendered yet
• Elements are overlaid by a waiting spinner
• Data are being processed in AJAX requests

This causes difficulties for both the team and the test project. The process requires manual control to ensure the program takes action, plus the test output tends to be unstable at times. That’s why tests based on the Selenium automation framework easily result in these Exceptions: NoSuchElementException, StaleElementReferenceException or ElementNotVisibleException.

Selenium waits are most chosen as solutions to minimize or avoid this timing problem. Selenium waits include two statements: Implicit and explicit waits, to make the WebDriver wait before throwing an ElementNotVisibleException exception. 

However, to make full use of the two practices, testers must be mindful of the conditions and execution practices. They need to possess programming expertise to insert the wait statements manually. The solution itself becomes other timing issues and pain points:

• Slower test creation time
• Worse and bigger code 
• Unstable execution output
• Slower test execution time
• Harder to debug and figure out the root causes
• Harder to maintain test scripts

which eventually causes:

• Low team performance
• High maintenance cost & effort
• Poor application under test (AUT) quality

How Katalon Smart Wait Solves the Web Loading Issue

Katalon Studio is a test automation software with comprehensive capabilities for web, mobile, API, and desktop testing. In its latest version, Katalon started to support the smart execution, or Smart Wait function, starting from Katalon Studio 7. Smart Wait is built to wait for all front end processes of the web page to complete before taking the next step without you having to add scripts manually.

You can choose whether to apply Smart Wait to the whole project or specific test cases on Katalon Studio. As the process automatically waits for front-end processing, your team can effectively reduce the time spent on creating, debugging, executing, analyzing, and maintaining test scripts. 

This new feature can speed up the test execution process, especially in the case of overnight-batch executions. You need someone to monitor when there is an unexpected failure so that the whole process is not interrupted halfway through. 

For highly scalable environments, teams can now invest their effort into testing scenarios and improve the test scripts quality instead of spending time writing test scripts. Plus, Katalon Smart Wait keeps the execution history clear to make it easy for analyzing, detecting operation insights and patterns, and reducing maintenance effort. 

How to Activate Katalon Smart Wait

Katalon Smart Wait is available starting from version 7.0.0. You have two options for using Smart Wait in your test projects:

1. To apply Smart Wait to all elements in a project

In Katalon Studio, navigate to Project > Settings > Execution > Select Enable in Default Smart Wait.

2. To apply Smart Wait to specific elements in a script

This option allows you to use the Smart Wait function for certain test elements only. Make sure you’ve disabled Default Smart Wait in Project Settings: Navigate to Project > Settings > Select Disable in Default Smart Wait.

To enable Smart Wait, use the enableSmartWait keyword, and disableSmartWait to disable it.

Please refer to the Katalon Documents for the detailed tutorial.

Conclusion

This is an interesting update from the Katalon team as it effectively solves the wait issue and ensures stable test outputs. Smart Wait significantly adds to Katalon’s unique automation capabilities. Visit www.katalon.com to explore more ultimate features of Katalon Studio 7.