6 Best Practices For Enhanced Api Test Automation In 2021

Quality Assurance team performs API testing which is a form of Black Box Testing. First of all, you need to set up a testing environment for API testing that includes the required set of parameters around the API. APIs make our phones “smart”, and they help to streamline a business process. If an API doesn’t perform efficiently and effectively, it will never be included in a software system. An error at the API level can break the flow of the entire application as a chain of integrated business processes will be disrupted. This type of test is performed to check whether the method accepts correct input and rejects incorrect input. Most importantly, test your API with a minimal number of users to ensure that your user’s experience is predictable.

If SOAP is like an envelope, REST is more like a lightweight postcard. REST APIs are considered the gold standard for scalability and are highly compatible with micro-service architecture. Instead, you should do away with these dependencies and follow actual api testing best practices user flows. Stubbing is used for creating an emulation of a SOAP or REST web service API. When you encounter any of the above scenarios during testing, virtualization is the most viable solution to enable continuous testing of the API as planned.

API testing helps developers to determine whether APIs meet expectations for functionality, performance, reliability, and security. The intention is to find bugs and any other unexpected behavior so your users don’t end up with a bad or insecure product. You want to make sure that you release APIs that work efficiently and effectively, or they won’t be adopted. Bitbucket already stores our source code, and their Pipelines tool allows us to quickly build triggers off of Git commands. Before a deployment can occur, we can slot in automations of the relevant test suites. Our front-end repositories kick off both Cypress and Jest tests.

Best Practices For Testing Apis: A Practical Guide For Developers

This process is time-consuming during product development and can go as far as pushing deadlines or cutting new features from your product in place. API enacts a bunch of operations that can be used by the development team, which allows them to save time by taking advantage of a platform’s implementation to do the essentials. This helps lessen the amount of code developers need to create, and also helps create more stability across apps for the same platform. The first post, which can be found here, provided a brief introduction on APIs, API testing and its relevance to the testing world.

If modern JS syntax or a non-transpiled npm package makes its way into a build, the browser may hit a parsing exception and not render the application at all. Automating tests on these browsers quickly alerts our team if there are any issues well before those changes can make it to production. Preventing flaky tests with mocking is an especially interesting line to toe but a critical one. For automated tests, our team makes sure some tests use real API responses and others use mocked responses. This allows us to fully test all edge cases without having to configure real API responses based on a potentially varying database to match each case. The CI/CD pipeline begins by building their submitted code, then running static code analysis.

Automation,innovation & Out Of Box

A typical smoke test calls the API to verify whether it responds. It also calls the REST API using a standard amount of test data, followed by a larger amount of data to check whether it responds correctly. These are just some of the basic elements included in an API test suite. The goal when testing and monitoring API transactions is to validate every component and process involved in data exchange. As you interact with the API, HTTP uses different methods to send requests and fetch data.

Validating the HTTP status code — Verify that the status code returned is correct for each request. For instance, check whether unpermitted requests return 403 FORBIDDEN. Content extraction is the process of parsing and extracting content from the response data.

Api Testing Tool

API testing is considered Blackbox testing, in which users send input and get output for verification. Automation with a data-driven approach, i.e. applying different data sets in the same test scenario, can help increase API test coverage. Lucidchart is the intelligent diagramming application that empowers teams to clarify complexity, align their insights, and build the future—faster. With this intuitive, cloud-based solution, everyone can work visually and collaborate in real time while building flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, and more. Ease into a testing routine by starting with the simple APIs that have only one or two inputs . Focusing on the small ones helps you to build confidence and ensure that your testing environment works properly before tackling the bigger APIs. Testing requests in isolation – Executing a single API request and checking the response accordingly.

• Another useful framework for mocking API requests and responses is Polly.JS, which allows users to record, replay, and stub HTTP interactions.
• An application programming interface is a set of protocols that allow application software and their services to communicate with each other.
• For example, error codes in the 400 to 500 range imply problematic APIs or web service providers.
• This reduces the time required to track bugs between builds, integrations, and even different team-members.
• Load Testing determines if an API can handle a large number of simultaneous users.

Behavior-driven development allows you to incorporate user stories into test scripts. Since these units are based on the same test script, you can reuse them as per need, improving API test automation’s flexibility. Library Architecture Framework- It is a framework that allows breaking test cases into smaller units and creates groups of modules with the same tasks.

Understanding Of The Business Application Logic

Following these steps ensures you do not miss out on some critical parameters required in the request and JSON response. Additionally, perform data-type tests on individual methods or operations to ensure they align with the parameters defined. API Testing Approach is a predefined strategy or a method that the QA team will perform in order to conduct the API testing after the build is ready. The API testing approach helps to better understand the functionalities, testing techniques, input parameters and the execution of test cases. APIs typically use protocols and standards that you may not normally work with. These protocols and standards are needed so that different platforms, applications, and systems can talk to each other. So not only do you need to test an API’s functionality, you need to test its performance, security, and how all of the components work together to create a reliable interface.

We have three main test classifications that include end-to-end feature testing, load and longevity testing, and high-availability testing. Our goal is to build these test classifications into our CI/CD pipeline process.

It increases productivity and helps you to make testing more efficient. Faster testing leads to faster fixes which leads to faster product releases. Even the smallest change would require writing new code to run an automated test, which could end up being more time consuming than a quick manual test. Manual testing has more focused attention on the testing process. Creating and executing your own tests manually can give you more nuanced control over the test.

Live Testing Process

If API is not tested properly, it may cause problems not only the API application but also in the calling application. Bring testers into the process while designing the API, not just at the end of the software development life cycle . Testers will help you find real-world use cases and validate that it’s providing real value, seamlessly connecting the right systems by exposing the right data in the right format. Teardown is the post-test stage in which we delete or reset system resources that were created or modified as part of the test. The exception to this is data that may be required for the debugging process in case of a test failure.

In API Testing, instead of using standard user inputs and outputs, you use software to send calls to the API, get output, and note down the system’s response. API tests are very different from GUI Tests and won’t concentrate silverlight on the look and feel of an application. It mainly concentrates on the business logic layer of the software architecture. APIs, or application programming interfaces, have taken over the software industry.

Performance Testing is used to embed API tests into a CI/CD pipeline used by developers to create the base code of an application. This helps identify any potential API issues early in the software development lifecycle. Pplication Programming Interfaces help software development teams to easily connect and engage in end-to-end business processes. However, these end-to-end processes can only be as high-performing as the APIs they depend on. A key benefit of API testing is having access to the application without a user interface and thus early identification of code-level issues which helps in earlier test maintenance. Edit and extend API tests while not writing codeTest Cases which are automated by using scripts are dependent on the system under test. With the correct automation check tools and testing framework, testers will edit and extend API tests while not editing even one line of code.

For example, the test case for a download feature should not depend on the sign-in test case execution. The success of API testing automation depends on not only a good framework but also the testing environment. So, it is essential to configure the test environment for API testing automation. The framework offers both Session-Based Exploratory Testing and manual testing features. In addition, postman enables Boolean test writing and allows extraction of web API data.

To ensure maximum efficiency and impact, quality engineering managers need mechanisms to monitor and evaluate test coverage across all test types. As more team members begin working with API test automation, mabl’s low-code user interface makes API testing accessible to non-coding team members, such as manual testers and product managers. As testing scales, quality professionals will also need systems in place to manage and track tests to ensure an effective API testing strategy.

Our most in-depth testing suites are very thorough but do not cover browser compatibility. Additionally, manual regression testing on different browsers is resource-intensive.

For instance, the sign-up flow, the login flow, or the export data flow. It is used for performing partial updates or modification of resources, but does not serve as a replacement for the PUT and POST methods. PATCH should only be used when updating an existing resource partially.