What is step?

step is a comprehensive automation solution designed to allow all automation specialists (testers, developers, business analysts, etc) to work together efficiently and to focus on what they’re best at. The content of that solution is two-fold:

a platform comprising multiple software components:
- a central controller which orchestrates the execution of automation scenarios and serves a web application used for scenario design and results analysis
- a scalable agent grid to run automation code in parallel and in a distributed way
- a mongodb database instance used to persist automation artefacts (plans, exections, etc)
a framework which provides developers and testers with various APIs and libraries:
- the Keyword API, which aims at decoupling test case implementation from its specification and data (inputs, outputs, expected results)
- a set of other APIs allowing developers to extend other areas of the product (such as interoperability APIs, customized reporting, etc)
- standard packages and plugins offering a wide range of services frequently used in automation contexts. These can be related to automation libs and approaches (such as Selenium or JMeter integration) or have more of a practical use (i.e reading and writing data from/to datasources like Excel or a SQL database)

The platform

The following screenshot will give you an idea of what the execution of an automation scenario looks like in step. It provides all means necessary for technical as well as non-technical users to design and execute automation scenarios.

Here’s a quick glance at what step’s architecture looks likes:

The framework

Here’s the main idea behind the Keyword API and what it looks like when working in Java or .NET (our two most dominant platforms):

Other APIs allow integration with different libraries, testing tools, data repositories, etc:

Where to start?

We recommend starting with some quick installation steps allowing you to run a local clusters before trying our your first keyword. The rest of this Getting Started will then take you to more interesting adventures. After that, we’ll leave it to you to explore the rest of this knowledge base to keep building your automation skills with step!