8 Best Practices In Api Automation Testing

Apply Testing techniques such as equivalence classes, boundary value analysis and error guessing and write test cases for the API. It comes with a report that provides complete information of the execution.

At the UI level, this simple test can fail at the browser and network connection level, having to load the browser each time we want to run an iteration of this test may fail. To ensure that the APIs work across devices, browsers, and operating systems. 9.Create test cases for all possible API input combinations to get complete test coverage. 2.Perform stress testing Association for Computing Machinery on the system through a series of API load tests. Once you’re happy with your tests, you can run them on a server with the same IP address as the real API. Here are 7 practical tips for developing a successful API in no time, and for more in-depth information on API testing. RapidAPI is the world’s largest API Hub with over 2,000,000 developers and 20,000 APIs.

Uml Diagrams Can Be Helpful For Visualizing The Flow Of Information In Your Api

This framework also allows you to create API proxies to leverage OpenAPI specifications. Postman allows us to create collections of integration tests to ensure that API is working as expected. For each test, an HTTP request is made, and assertions written in JavaScript are then used to verify the integrity of code. Since APIs are critical in terms of data and work as a bridge between the app and the device, they need to be tested to ensure that the data are represented correctly. Testing the API solves a lot of issues in the application, which may arise at some point in the future.

In certain cases, you may need a security expert to help design the security-related API tests and select the preferred tool to use. For the remainder of the tests, nearly any standard tool will work. Examples of tools that perform API testing include Postman, Katalon and Karma. Choose an API testing answer with Selenium-based web UI testing and a native visual editor. With such tools, the tester will load tests developed in Selenium and scale them over multiple browsers.

Api Automation Testing Using Postman

The guidelines above are applicable to any API, but for simplicity, in this post, we assume the most widely used Web API architecture — REST over HTTP. If your API is designed as a truly RESTful API, it is important to check that the REST contract is a valid one, including all HTTP REST semantics, conventions, and principles . To ensure that the implementation is working as specified according to the requirements specification . Mike Cohn’s famous Test Pyramid places API tests at the service level , which suggests that around 20% or more of all of our tests should focus on APIs . CloudUnlock the power of your data strategy now and in the future with cloud innovation. You can measure CPU usage across a cluster that hosts your application’s API code, as well as the number of processes waiting to run which is also known as CPU load or run-queue-size. Memory can be simply measured as a percentage of available memory that is in use.

A sizable human touch is required to ensure that automated testing actually saves a team time. However, there can also be faulty APIs responding with an 200 OK status that was not designed using the correct HTTP status code. Synthetic monitoring tools can compare the result of a test with an expected value to confirm the accuracy of the API response, beyond the status code. Using synthetic monitoring tools with multi-step API monitors is one way you can improve API availability with data reliability. Just remember, synthetic monitoring uses only a predefined set of API calls. Therefore, real-world traffic can be different from the inputs in synthetic monitoring.

Testing verifies the business logic of an application at the API level, which connects data layers to user-interface layers. The tests can make requests to a single or multiple API endpoints to determine whether an API meets the functionality, reliability, performance, and security requirements.

Want To Automate Testing The Right Way? Follow These Best Practices

If the APIs connecting to the payment gateways fail, you lose both customers and revenue. Therefore, monitoring and controlling your API is crucial to ensure success in every step of the transaction in your application. You monitor APIs to detect a failed or slow application transaction before your end-users report the problem.

So, you need to understand the strategies, test case types, automation frameworks, and execution approach to make an informed decision. With a centralized test automation platform, the NCR quality team was able to rebuild their API testing strategy and move API testing from afterthought to a central pillar of web testing. API Testing is performed through special software tools that send specific calls to the API and examine the outputs against expectations. It is different than Graphical User Interface tests because api testing best practices it places the focus on business logic instead of the user experience. Automation is another key best practice and helpful for repetitive testing tasks and processes that are difficult to conduct manually. Automation is critical for achieving continuous delivery since it allows software teams to run more tests in less time, accelerate testing lifecycles, and increase testing efficiency. Automation is particularly ideal for regression test cases and applications where testing is required before every new release.

The first digit of the status code defines the class of response. The last two digits do not have any class or categorization role. For example, the output of the “Create user” API will be the input of the “Get user” API for verification. The output of the “Get user” API can be used as the input of the “Update user” API, and so on. Unlike SOAP-based Web services, there is no official standard for RESTful Web APIs. An API is essentially the “middle man” of the layers and systems within an application or software.

As the test automation design is ready, the next step is to execute the API testing for your systems. The reason to avoid automation for these test cases is the high number of false positives they offer as results and the high cost of test automation. In addition, once you have the automation plan ready, you need to think about the approach necessary for execution, as the implementation can be far more complex than what you have planned.

You want to avoid repeating your code, but many tests require you to address the same components or similar actions. In these cases, you can create a common library to wrap your test requests and make the usage shorter and the process simpler. The application might slow down drastically or at times even crash if the changes in the application do not work with the APIs you use.

Essential Api Testing Automation Best Practices

API testing is critical to ensure that our digital life runs in an increasingly seamless and efficient manner. Continuous testing is also very important to ensure that everything continues to work exactly as it should. The risk of releasing a bad and potentially insecure product in the market is greater has its repercussions. API testing like any other testing tries to uncover bugs related to inconsistencies or deviations from the expected behavior. You should be able to demonstrate that it’s fast, efficient, and easy to use. After you have completed all of your testings, it’s time to implement it into your API.

In order to perform API testing better, you should first understand the different types of API testing, which we cover below. Functional Testing verifies response codes, validates responses, and checks error codes for application functions.

What Do You Need To Start Api Testing?

An open channel of interaction between the developers and testers can be the way forward to minimize the defects and make the process of API security testing easier and time-saving. API security testing can be supported by a specific set of tools, be it open-source or commercial tools. Thus, a major challenge that QA teams face is the selection of viable tools that support API testing. To name a few- SoapUI, Postman, Apigee, etc., are popular tools for end-to-end API testing. API monitoring and testing are not daunting tasks when you pair the right techniques with the right tools. Accurate API monitoring and testing data will enable you to improve application performance, avoid production outages, and improve customer satisfaction.

• Manager of Test Automation Matt Wood said Vail’s test execution and reporting systems are purposefully designed to be both dev-friendly and efficient.
• Generate API tests mechanicallyBuilding a comprehensive set of API tests is vital to ensure that your APIs can run on a reasonable level of risk.
• Test data and execution details can be saved along with API End Points.
• Results of non-functional tests such as performance, security, etc.
• This process runs a single request to a single endpoint, looking for a single response or set of responses.
• An API consists of multiple methods and operations, which should be tested individually and collectively by combining multiple API calls.

As discussed above, API monitoring is integrable into the test automation process on your CI/CD pipeline. Therefore, the tool you select to use to monitor and control APIs should be able to integrate with your CI server (e.g., Jenkins or Github integration). 401 requests have invalid or missing authentication credentials that can often be resolved with a proper authentication such as an OAuth token. Other common mistakes include forgetting the space in a prefix, or adding the required colon after a username even if there is no password.

A software application executing an API contains functions that another system can execute. We automatically run unit tests on check-in to make sure that the business logic is correct and also run integration testing to make sure that component interfaces are not broken. RedShelf also tests full automation on builds to make sure that a code change does not break existing functionality.

Avoid repeating the code, but many tests require addressing the same components or similar actions. In such cases, you might want to create a common library to wrap the test requests and make their usage shorter and the process as simpler as possible. It’s crucial to test the user’s approach on how they are going to interact with the application’s user interface.