7 Best Practices for Testing APIs: A Practical Guide for Developers

If it is not tested properly, it can create problems while calling the application. It is a crucial and mandatory test in the software lifecycle. Having the right tool and process for API testing is the most important task as it is the crucial component for any application. There are many open-source and commercial tools available for API testing.

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. Testing automation is a business decision, and that is why you need to consider all the aspects of automated API tests.

It behaves like an interface between different software systems for being interactive with each other. API is a set of functions, subroutines, protocols, standards, and code that glues our technical world together. You will not only see your SOAP API working, but will also ensure that the response is returning the correct data. Additionally, BlazeMeter helps you to create tests with the Traffic Inspector.

These resolvers can be written in any language since the GraphQL schema is designed to be uniform in a language-agnostic way. In addition to this, you can buildWebhook listenerson Slack with BlazeMeter API Monitoring. No major limitations exist but you need to have a good API testing skillset to be a tester. The travel app has to communicate with the participating airline companies to show the traveler the best flight times and prices.

Difference between API testing and Unit testing

They can be a simple few-word string , or a hundred-page JSON/XML file. Hence, it is essential to choose a suitable verification method for a given API. However, your test coverage will increase dramatically if the tool has this function. Does the tool support test the API/Web service types that your AUT is using? It will not make sense if the selected tool supports testing RESTful services while your AUT is using SOAP services.

Today, API testing is a critical component of the overall testing checklist that enterprises must consider while formulating test strategies for their digital applications. However, many enterprises don’t have a robust API testing strategy as they may be unaware of the impact API makes. This is especially true for the Representational State Transfer or REST category, which is one of the most dominant API architectures.

Learn How to Secure Your REST APIs

As you may already know, API stands for Application Programming Interface. You can think of an API as a brain with many individual neurons that are activated by specific impulses. Any company can create an application that sends an impulse to a public API and receives a certain response.

• The summit of the pyramid, on the other hand, is slower because manual testing scenarios primarily do it.
• These resources might be web services, databases, mainframes, or third-party applications, among others.
• Additionally, it can help to improve the overall quality of the API.
• By using automation, a clear and unbiased data-driven testing effort can be brought into your API testing strategy and seamlessly executed.
• In either case, the operation is a simple string that a GraphQL server can parse and respond to with data in a specific format.

By including security and performance testing as part of your API testing, you can ensure that your API is secure and efficient, which will help garner the trust of your customers. If your API starts to perform poorly, it could be unhappy users and lost revenue. Instead of manually testing your API, you can use a special tool to automate the process. You can use different tools to test your API and highlight any inefficient code that is slowing down the process. In addition, having continuous testing in place to test your APIs regularly can help you avoid costly and embarrassing outages.

Component Testing

With the correct automation check tools and testing framework, testers will edit and extend API tests while not editing even one line of code. Now that you have the types of tests decided, strategy formulated, and configured the environment, it is time to build test cases. Is a cross-cloud API testing tool that offers access to different editors at the same time. It is a multi-step framework that is powered by Javascript and is compatible with multiple APIs. This framework also allows you to create API proxies to leverage OpenAPI specifications. If you’re testing an API, you need to treat it exactly as a consumer would.

It is essential to make a test maintenance plan and stick to it. Nodes frequently change, and the security procedures used to transmit data and files https://globalcloudteam.com/ also fluctuate. Therefore, it is essential to prepare resources to maintain API tests with any backend modifications that impact the API system.

SOAP interfaces can process multiple protocol types (HTTP, SMTP TCP, etc.). Thus, while REST APIs enable flexible high-speed communication, SOAP web services are slightly slower but offer more built-in functionality. Put another way, you compose the request, submit it, then wait for the API to respond. A decent API testing tool, mainly automated testing, saves time and allows testers to shift left to identify errors sooner. Mizu, Postman, Katalon Studio, Swagger, Apache JMeter, and Rest Assured are some of the top API testing tools utilized in 2022. After building a testing strategy, choosing a tool to perform the tests is essential because it can impact the overall process.

Today’s distributed software environments incorporate a variety of APIs with every interface your software touches, from mobile to microservices. Each API has to be continuously tested and verified to ensure your software functions as it should. Parasoft’s API testing platform makes quick, efficient, and intelligent work of such requirements. This concludes the blog; hopefully, you now have a better understanding of API testing and why it is so crucial.

Having tests rely on the state of previous tests

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. API testing tools ensure that the APIs work as expected and help you build reliable and scalable APIs. Most of the high-end API testing tools offer solutions for execution of these nonfunctional test types. When you integrate applications that depend on APIs for data or messaging, you need an API testing strategy.

C) The expected response time and the expected throughput for all user loads. Although testing just the availability is not enough, most API transactions involve data exchange, so it becomes quite necessary to ensure that the data is reliable. You can also test if the APIs are functioning correctly by validating the inputs and ensuring their data is structured in the correct format. The data formatting schema specifies how REST APIs handle responses and requests. The challenge in maintaining data formatting is that whenever new parameters are added, they have to be included in the schema. If they are not validated properly, issues such as wrong string/data types and parameter data outside the predefined value range can come up.

Security Testing

Enterprises need to focus on encrypting data passing via APIs. They must ensure that APIs are guarded against suspicious activities and intrusions. Security testing needs to be executed strategically to ensure that all protective measures work as per their intended objectives. Some frameworks have good documentation, and it’s easy to find documentation and examples for your platform.

This enables you to write partial tests that drive your application step by step, writing your test and application code at the same time. In the era of GDPR, HIPAA, and similar regulations across different parts of the world, enterprises must not take security aspects liberally. APIs, being a critical pillar of digital transformation, need extra care and protection. Hence, performing security testing of APIs is a core responsibility that enterprise leaders must address. So, the next thing to do is to be aware of the best practices to execute REST API Tests. While building your testing checklist, the following tips must be a foundation.

Without baseUrl set, Cypress loads main window in localhost + random port

GraphQL API testing involves a variety of test types that range from testing the actual implementation of the schemas and resolvers to load and security testing. Frontend teams can release changes without waiting for backend changes to catch up, as would be the case with REST. At the same time, backend developers also benefit by not having to worry about versioning APIs to synchronize with the frontend. API describes how one software program communicates and exchanges data with other software programs.

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. Thus, a great potential for volatile and unpredictable traffic exists. It’s api testing best practices wise to use broad performance testing to determine if your API meets expectations when it encounters surging demand or erratic behavior. Specifying automated test cases along a wide range of test types and protocols that developers use for APIs like HTTP/REST, Swagger, Kafka, MQ, JSON, EDI, JMS, and fixed-length messages.

With such tools, the tester will load tests developed in Selenium and scale them over multiple browsers. Run multiple tests at the same time to verify functional ways and back-end APIs and services. Analyze the outputs from all connecting systems gain access to a lot of features to facilitate the collaboration of testing assets and information between developers and analysts. APIs are helping software applications with day-to-day tasks and fast track data sharing, resulting in an uninterrupted interaction between internal and external applications.

For the moment, let’s assume that for some reason your application desperatelyneeds that last bit of after or afterEach code to run. We see many of our users adding code to an after or afterEach hook in order to clean up the state generated by the current test. Typically, when going through scenarios like user registration or forgotten passwords, your server schedules an email to be delivered.