Karate vs. Cucumber: A Comparison of Frameworks for Automated API Testing

Companies are increasingly adopting innovative practices for their software projects to improve the quality in the development and delivery of a project.

This implies leaving behind traditional methodologies and adding agile development as a new way to carry out projects. 

This innovative, agile ecosystem, where there is continuous integration and deployment, and which involves performing iterations frequently, requires a greater number of deliverables than the traditional one, since the product grows in functionality with each iteration and is built integrating the client.

When talking about agility, it is common that the first word we think of is Scrum, since it is one of the most used methodologies in agile development.  However, there are many others less used or uncommon, such as XP, Kanban, Lean. 

These methodologies allow achieving better results and responding to changes more quickly and flexibly, integrating clients throughout the development process. The philosophy of these methodologies is supported by the agile manifesto.

Regarding the application of agile development methodologies, you should consider building the product under these fundamental principles:

• The software should maintain simplicity as much as possible.
• It should have rapid feedback.
• The structure should allow incremental change.
• The software should be quality work.

Under these principles and thinking about the nature of software development, where changes are integrated incrementally and continuously, it is key to maintain quality and functionality.

How to maintain software quality and functionality? 

You can achieve this through automated testing.

Automated tests help in this continuous process of changes and deliveries because once you automate the test set, you can visualize early if a change caused any functionality to be lost in the software or modified piece.

Frameworks for Automated Testing

Karate and Cucumber are two frameworks for automated testing and we want to show you which delivers better results in terms of usability and compatibility.

Cucumber and Karate are based on the BDD (Behavior Driven Development) methodology, which is an improvement of TDD (Test Driven Development), a test-based development methodology. BDD, unlike TDD, includes the business and allows both the technical and business teams to relate through a common language called Gherkin, used to describe the behavior of the software. It uses five general statements:

• Feature: indicates the software feature.
• Scenario: indicates in which scenario the test will be performed.
• Given: indicates that “given that” a scenario exists, the test will be performed.
• When: indicates that “when a condition exists” the test will be performed.
• Then: indicates that “then” an expected behavior will occur in the test.

Now that you have seen how the Gherkin language works, we can review the frameworks we will use to perform automated tests.

Cucumber

For this exercise, we will use Cucumber with JVM.  If you are using another language that is not Java, there are other integrations. We will use Maven for dependencies.  In the  pom.xml add the following: 

Cucumber Spring integration

To add cucumber-jvm:

<dependency>    
	<groupId>io.cucumber</groupId>    
  <artifactId>cucumber-java</artifactId>    
  <version>6.8.0</version>    
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

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Then, add the dependency for Junit and cucumber:

<dependency>    
  <groupId>io.cucumber</groupId>    
  <artifactId>cucumber-junit</artifactId>    
  <version>6.8.0</version>    
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>