Software development

Api Testing Checklist And Best Practices

We appreciate the flexibility of mock functions in Jest, so for complex APIs we’d recommend Jest over Jasmine. Jasmine also has a plugin (jasmine-ajax) used to mock AJAX calls, but it isn’t as flexible as Jest. It replaces the XMLHttpRequest object in a browser with a custom response.

Meaning, an API test is about 35 times faster than a UI test. API testing is also important because it offers several advantages over other types of testing, like unit and UI testing. To assess whether the API works like it’s supposed to, you need to run multiple tests.

Unit Testing In Asp Net Core Web Api

It has simple-to-use tabular test data syntax, and it uses the keyword-driven testing approach. Its testing abilities extended or reached out by test libraries executed either with Python or Java. Users make new higher-level keywords from existing ones using the similar syntax used for creating test cases. Robot Framework hosted on GitHub to find further documentation, source code, and issue tracker. However, there could be no output at all, or something entirely unpredicted occurs. It makes the tester’s job essential to the application development process because APIs are the central focal point of data applications.

api testing best practices

REST Assured is the best fit for functional testing of REST API services and it requires strong coding skills to create tests. API testing is the process of sending requests to an API and monitoring the responses to ensure its behaving as expected. API testing is designed to assess the functionality, reliability, performance, and security of an API, and is therefore an essential part of the API development lifecycle. To support enhanced test automation collaboration, mabl introduced the activity feed. Unit testing is one of the most valuable types of automated testing.

As you know, API testing is an integral part of the software development and quality assurance processes. Automated testing of your APIs will undoubtedly save you time and even costs during your software development lifecycle. Armed with this blog, you should now have enough information to formulate your API Testing automation plan. Mayhem for API supports REST APIs, not SOAP, while SoapUI supports SOAP, and not REST. Soap API has built-in support for mocking servers and data, helping you test APIs by setting up a series of expected responses. Robot Framework is a test automation framework used for acceptance Test-Driven Development and Acceptance testing.

The Smart Way To Do Api Testing

It is up to integration tests to check if the model binding works properly. API testing automation is a process of automating the API testing process. Developers can do this in various ways, but the most common approach is to use an automation tool to create and run tests. API testing automation can help you speed up the testing process and ensure that all your tests are run consistently and accurately.

Additionally, automated testing is more accurate than manual testing counterparts. They save developers time when executing tests throughout the entire development life, not just when writing new code. This market growth corresponds to the rise in cloud applications and interconnected platforms that require application programming interfaces . More APIs mean more testing to determine that they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security. Without this testing, an API may fail to perform as expected, which can impact many softwares and services.

api testing best practices

So, we encourage you to pay attention to API testing as well and apply it to smooth the overall development workflow. If the request doesn’t return the needed value at the server layer, it won’t be displayed at the UI layer either. Not relying on UI to be ready, API tests can be performed early in the development cycle. This way, they’ll kill at least half of the bugs before they get serious. Usually, API testing is performed on APIs produced by the in-house development team. We don’t test third-party APIs, but we can test the way our software accepts their requests.

Easy Integration With Gui

Before you start testing, you need to first understand the purpose of the API, how the API functions, and what results to expect when using the API. Now that we understand some of the benefits of API testing, let’s walk through how to perform it. Validation tests are run late in the testing stage to verify the behavior and efficiency of the API. Through API Monitoring Teams in BlazeMeter you and your team are able to share your buckets and request data across a group of people. API testing not only detects failures on the API but also on other components of the system leading your tests to have greater coverage.

One of the critical factors that you need to prepare for is resource acquisition for test automation. It is common that testing a few first APIs such as login, query some resources, etc. is quite simple. Knowing the purpose of the API will set a firm foundation for you to well prepare your test data for input and output. For example, for some APIs, you will verify the responses against the database; and for some others, it is better to verify the responses against other APIs. If you’re testing an API, you need to treat it exactly as a consumer would.

The challenge consists of writing a function that takes a string containing a list of comma-separated numbers and returns their sum. There are further rules (ignore numbers greater than 1000, throw if negative numbers are passed, etc.), but we’re ignoring those for simplicity’s sake. So, you can also think of them as executable specifications or documentation.

So, make sure your build process executes your unit tests and marks the build as broken when the tests fail. As it turns out, unit tests are a great tool to document such assumptions. If the assumption turns out to be false—or becomes false after a while—the test fails. The main advantage of unit tests over other types of software tests is their laser-sharp focus. If you have unit tests that verify the behavior of a function, and the test fails, then in the vast majority of cases you can be sure that the problem is in the function. Since they’re fast, they’re executed more often, making them a source of nearly constant valuable feedback.

What Is Api?

API testing needs to be part of your overall digital strategy. You deserve tools that offer more flexibility with the toolset that you like to use. Jasmine is more light-weight and faster than Jest, but has less features. Jest is more descriptive when you run tests in the console, but if you are more of a minimalist you may like Jasmine better.

So API scripts are a big plus in a performance testing workflow. A small piece of the total number of automation test types that should be created. All the reasons I just listed have given test automation a reputation for being unreliable and not worth the effort to create. Luckily, the type of automation Agile focuses on is Unit testing (and the more reliable API lower-level testing) and less on GUI automation. The above example is often referred to as the client/server relationship. A client makes a request by asking for a resource, and the request goes out to find the server that will fulfill the request.

These tests can be set up to monitor availability and speed issues, and the data collected over time can be used to analyze the performance trends. 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. They are the gateway through which an organization delivers applications and services, both externally and internally, to customers and partners. Despite an awareness of the business-critical nature of APIs, many organizations don’t prioritize API testing, and software development shops don’t test APIs on a regular basis.

It is also possible to strengthen the security forClient Certificates in BlazeMeter. Customers APIs not only require client certificates, but also an additional key file or passphrase. For that, we have enhanced the PEM-encoded Client Certificates based authentication for API Monitoring Tests to also accept a key file or a passphrase.

Each unit test is like a specification or example of how that tiny portion—i.e. By executing the suite of tests, developers can get immediate feedback when they change some codebase. Some frameworks have good documentation, and it’s easy to find documentation and examples for your platform. Now that you have the types of tests decided, strategy formulated, and configured the environment, it is time to build test cases. Data access and flow should be defined well for the automation of API testing.

  • Then, a series of unit tests can be designed to ensure the bug has been eliminated before sending the entire code through the end-to-end testing process again.
  • 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.
  • Therefore, it is essential to identify each team member’s experience and skills.
  • As we mentioned in the What is API article, APIs are software programs without GUI.
  • API is a computing interface which enables communication and data exchange between two separate software systems.
  • For certain Agile practices like continuous builds, when new code is checked in, the amount of time it takes to receive feedback from a GUI regression suite of tests is unacceptable.

Friend of mabl NCR faced this very same challenge with their API tests. Though their team recognized the value of API tests, the process was too complex and code-heavy to accomplish on a regular basis. Having API testing reside in the same mabl platform as their standard UI tests helped their team cross-check API test coverage against browser testing. As testing scales, quality professionals will also need systems in place to manage and track tests to ensure an effective API testing strategy. Since we’re talking about automated testing, it makes sense to automate the whole process of running the tests and taking some action when they fail.

The use of APIs is on the rise as more and more companies realize the value of revealing their data and functionality to third-party developers. This has led to a surge in the number of APIs being implemented and a corresponding increase in the need for API testing. Ideally, the API should take any issues and handle them, rather than failing.

Selenium Guide

A key part of API testing is usingAPI assertionsto ensure your APIs are up, fast and returning the expected data. You can either make assertions on the Assertions tab or you can use BlazeMeter’s Script Engine to execute custom JavaScript code before or after request steps. Sure, developers can and should run the tests on their development machines as often as they can. If they’re following the TDD approach, they necessarily are. Making the tests part of the build process will add an extra layer of safety. Even if a developer forgets to test on their machine, the CI server won’t, and that will prevent buggy code from getting to the customers.

Reduce The Fixed Data Sources

I hope you now have a broad overview of REST API testing and the different approaches to it. If you are curious about how fuzz testing can help you build more secure web apps, you can check out the step-by-step REST API testing guide I have created. Follow these instructions to make sure that your test inputs cover all REST API endpoints and parameter combinations that are relevant to the security of your applications. Especially with black-box testing tools, error reporting for REST APIs is tricky, as the amount of tested parameter combinations is unknown. The best way to monitor and report REST API tests is with coverage-guided testing approaches, as they can provide meaningful coverage and error reports. I’m often asked the question, “How do I go about testing web services?

You can use your own users to test your API or you can use external tools. It first arrived as a Google Chrome extension to test API services and now is a full-fledged automation https://globalcloudteam.com/ tool for testing. It improves the development efficiency of API tests through built-in collaborative capabilities and native integrations to enterprise hubs.

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. Postman is being used in masses, has numerous facets and is easy to work with. It has a straightforward user- interface that will ease sending requests, fill in required test data, select the HTTP method and hit the “Send” button.

Integration testing focuses on verifying that the interactions of many small components can integrate together without issue. Since API tests bypass the user interface, they tend to be quicker and much more reliable than GUI tests. The sooner bugs are found the better since a developer instantly knows the code changes they made have broken the build and need to be looked at.

Here are the most usual HTTP verbs -A POST request adds a new record to a database. HTTP headers that give data to the server about the request. Designed primary for UI testing, Katalon is also an integrated api testing best practices environment meant to easily generate and execute API tests. Requests, an open-source Python HTTP library, was released under the Apache2 License with the aim of simplifying HTTP requests.

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