Origin of Karate

Peter Thomas (creator of Karate open-source) was part of the API platform leadership at Intuit where his team was responsible for a set of 15 services. It was early December 2016, and Peter was in the process of troubleshooting one of the automated tests that his team was working on, and he was trying to solve an issue which had been slowing down the team – which was that a particular test for the core accounting services system was unstable. The test would randomly fail, and this was blocking a production release - because it was not clear if there was a problem with the test or if there was a genuine defect. The test that Peter was looking at was implemented in the Java programming language and it also depended on a framework created in-house, which had evolved over a period of 3 to 4 years.

Peter was troubled. Despite his many years of Java programming experience, it was very hard to understand what the test was doing. The test depended on code contained in multiple files scattered across the workspace, and this only made matters worse. It was clear that many programmers had attempted to fix this test over the years, and Peter started to think hard about whether there was a better way to express web-service functional tests.

Peter concluded that most of the complexity he was experiencing was because Java was not well-suited for the domain of testing web-services. The term “impedance mismatch” is well-known in the fields of Science and Information Technology to depict a situation where two independent technologies don’t work well together when combined. An impedance mismatch leads to inefficiencies, and additional effort needed to work around the gaps. Peter was convinced that he was looking at a textbook case of “impedance mismatch” between Java and Web-Services.

Key realization for Peter was that JavaScript is far more effective than Java when it comes to working with JSON.

Peter also had a hypothesis that teams were not able to achieve the ideal level of functional test coverage simply because the impedance mismatch between Java and JSON made it too hard. He studied the test-suites in other projects as well, and found many examples where tests were incomplete, as they were not fully validating the JSON responses returned upon invoking a web-service. In his mind, this was a huge risk, because such tests would fail to detect problems that would break end-user experiences if released to production. Peter was convinced that a new approach was needed, and he decided to try and find a solution.

The Birth of Karate

Peter was able to quickly build a prototype that could interpret short, human-friendly commands expressing the “intent” of calling a web-service. It would then make the actual calls using Java code designed to be general-purpose. The success of this experiment convinced Peter that he could create a super-readable Domain Specific Language (DSL) for making any kind of web-service call. The “domain” here being the world of HTTP, JSON and XML.

It was at this point Peter decided to call the framework “Karate”.

Public Reception

On February 09, 2017, Karate was released as to the public as an open-source project.

A breakthrough for the Karate project came in the form of a man named Joe Colantonio, a prominent test-automation evangelist. Joe had looked at Karate, immediately liked what he saw, and came out with not only a blog-post, but a ten minute YouTube tutorial to go with it. Karate had finaly arrived.

Joe opened his video with the words “awesome” and called out how easy it was to get up and running and how simple it was to write tests. The interest in Karate took off, and questions and feedback started appearing on the project web-site.

What started as a powerful, scriptable framework combining API and UI test automation, is adopted as a best-practice today - in teams around the world.

Karate Labs Inc.

In our continued mission to democratise testing, we decided to leave our day jobs and work on Karate full time with the primary focus of keeping our open-source community’s participation and trust. For this, we needed to be profitable to ensure a balance between improving the open-source code, ensuring effective user onboarding, and providing community support.

We incorporated Karate Labs in 2021 as a for profit company to improve the open-source code and building premium features to generate income. Paid features have given us the ability to hire more developers to work on both versions of the product, to continue releasing more features and make test-automation simple and fun.