Two-week sprint, no explicit automation budget, fast design changes, minimal unit tests, huge regression cycle and APIs to be consumed by the frontend not yet ready and to add to it no existing automation framework – sounds like a situation which every quality analyst would have been challenged with. As an automation engineer, we invest on automated UI frameworks when the project is in the initial stages of development only to realize later on that it has resulted in a high maintenance code or flaky tests due to evolving UI and ends in a low ROI. Using Karate as the proposed solution for automating REST APIs, I was able to build up an automation framework from scratch within a couple of hours, add a handful of test scenarios, integrate framework to Jenkins, execute the tests and share reports with the team. The backend team was also able to visualize and forecast the amount of development effort required for developing the API’s. Regression cycle time was reduced by 6 MDs over 6 months leaving room for other important test activities like exploratory testing. The best part I like about Karate is that for a Quality analyst who is required to focus on multiple test activities as well as perform automation test development, the learning curve is really small. As they say keeping things simple is the hardest, that’s why Karate is the winner when it comes to automating REST API’s.