What is Step?

Step is a full-featured orchestration platform for software automation. It unifies the software automation disciplines and enables the reuse of automation artifacts through the whole DevOps lifecycle, from large scale test automation to load & performance tests, RPA and monitoring.

It provides all the means to make the most of existing automation artefacts by enabling their reusability over different automation tasks and teams on one centralized platform, and thus reduce duplication of code, tools and resources over projects:

Step focuses on providing a unique platform for the orchestration of multi-purpose scalable automation scenarios while integrating existing automation tools (mainly test automation tools) and DevOps platforms:

How to start with Step?

The simplest and most efficient way to start using Step is to get a SaaS instance and follow one of the getting started tutorials. Simply select the one that best fits your use-case.

If you prefer installing your own cluster, follow the Quick setup guide

How to get it?

Step SaaS (recommended)	Step On-Prem
Step SaaS allows you to set up a Step cluster in just a few easy steps and immediately access it. Best of all, you are only billed for your actual usage, so you can test it risk-free or scale it to enterprise-level demands.	With our established Step On-Prem you can have complete control over your own Step clusters with your own CPU, storage solution and network management. Download and install it on your own hardware to get started.
Start directly in the Step Portal	How to set up Step On-Prem

Architecture of Step

Step is a platform and a framework at the same time:

The Step platform

The Step platform consists of following components:

• Controller: the central component which orchestrates the execution of automation scenarios (Plans) and serves the central web application used for scenario design and reporting
• Agent: the scalable component which is responsible for the execution of the automation logic (Keywords)
• Agent Grid: a scalable grid for the Agent component which distributes the automation logic executions
• Database: persists automation artefacts (plans, executions, etc) and reports

The Step framework

The Step framework that provides developers and testers with various open APIs and libraries:

• the Automation Package API providing developers with an open, extensible and unified API to specify the wide range of automation scenario supported by the Step platform (See Automation Packages overview for details)
• the Keyword API, which aims at decoupling the automation code (scripts) from its specification and data (inputs, outputs, expected results). (See Keyword API)
• 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 data sources like Excel or a SQL database)