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Today's software testing industry demands effective and automated API testing procedures more than ever, as manual tests take up time from internal teams while often leading to poor customer experiences; issues might later surface themselves through customer reports if your manual tests don't detect them beforehand.
Present-day test automation solutions tend to focus on user interface testing. At the same time, most API-level QA is still done manually.
Accessible, intelligent API testing tools are in high demand as more businesses focus on building highly productive and agile environments for themselves and their teams.
What Is API Test Automation?
API test automation uses an automated testing tool to programmatically run API tests within continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines at predetermined intervals or both.
Agile teams find API test automation especially essential as it enables rapid development cycles while consistently and methodically testing whether their API functions as intended. API test automation should supplement manual approaches by helping prevent potentially detrimental changes from reaching production.
Automating API tests enables teams to save developer bandwidth while releasing new features confidently and quickly.
This article will outline how API test automation fits into today's software development landscape and discuss its role in aiding teams' leftward shift.
Furthermore, we will outline some of its significant advantages and best practices and explain how groups can automate API tests across every stage of an API's lifecycle.
Importance Of API Testing
Unit/Component Tests
Unit/component tests provide the greatest return and value at this early testing tier. Most developers conduct them, with unit tests typically reaching 70-88% code coverage with equal effort.
Business Rules/Functional Tests
At this level of testing, the primary emphasis lies on testing an application's business rules. Tests are run against user stories to ensure each implemented function works as intended.
Because data displayed in user interfaces of Web and mobile applications often comes directly from servers through APIs and services, API testing must ensure these APIs and services remain accurate; approximately 20% of testing effort may need to go toward this level alone.
Workflow Tests (Through The UI)
Functional User Interface testing ensures the application's features are built as intended through its user interface.
Any modifications could disrupt automated available UI tests. This inflexible process relies heavily on software functionality testing tools for its success.
Read More: Maximizing Efficiency with IT Automation: How Much Can Your Business Save?
What Part Does API Test Automation Play In A World Where APIs Come First?
Testing API-first development methods requires API testing because this enables teams to validate the functionality and ensure its operation as intended.
While maintaining API quality assurance is only half the battle, couples also need to release new features quickly to stay competitive and often utilize an agile development method where minor updates may arrive multiple times daily or weekly, supporting fast development cycles but with a higher risk for breaking changes.
Automation solves this challenge by maintaining team agility without compromising API quality or test coverage. Every time new code is committed by developers, automated API tests run within a continuous integration/continuous deployment pipeline or on a scheduled basis - giving any development team peace of mind that any problems won't slip past them unnoticed.
How Can Left-Leaning Teams Benefit From Automated API Testing?
Software testing has traditionally been undertaken towards the end of long development cycles by dedicated QA teams, taking considerable time and often leaving teams scrambling at the last minute to address last-minute problems.
Unfortunately, this approach leads to delays as teams run to address unexpected complications as quickly as possible.
The Shift-left testing process can help address this bottleneck by performing tests earlier and more frequently throughout development.
Automation allows developers to automatically run tests inside of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipelines whenever new code is pushed, allowing development teams, including API creators, to continuously verify their work before it enters production leading to timely, secure releases with reduced costs and timelines.
What Are A Few Advantages Of Automated API Testing?
Teams can utilize API test automation to check that their APIs are functioning as intended, just like manual API testing.
Still, it has several other advantages that enhance developer processes and facilitate rapid iteration. Teams may automate API tests to:
Recognize Problems As Soon As They Arise
Test automation enables developers to detect problems by setting up continuous integration and development (CI/CD) pipelines to run API tests automatically after every code push from teams.
This provides instantaneous feedback while the code is still being written; should any issues arise during testing, developers can address them immediately before they ever reach production and cause user problems.
Save Time And Resources
QA automation testing teams that must review every feature within an exact timeline often come under great stress when testing is left until the end of a development cycle.
This method can be laborious and time-consuming; delays may arise while development teams address unanticipated problems. Automated API testing helps alleviate some of this pressure by spreading the testing strategy load throughout its lifecycle; this reduces feedback loops, increases productivity, and allows teams to launch features as soon as feasible.
API Testing Techniques
This section presents five methodologies you can integrate to create the optimal pipeline and ensure thorough API testing.
Functional Testing
Functional testing is central to verifying API functionality. Unit and integration tests serve this function effectively by prioritizing execution capabilities over performance metrics.
Functional testing should usually be your initial approach because it offers immediate and tangible results. You should also conduct non-functional tests alongside functional ones because functional testing provides no insight into the actual performance of code changes.
Non-Functional Testing
After making sure everything functions as intended, non-functional tests will allow you to assess the stability and performance of features about particular parts of your app.
Non-functional testing provides insight into its abilities and responses in various situations.
API load testing can provide helpful insight into your application's ability to handle specific loads with its API interface; stress testing can confirm spikes in traffic volumes, and performance testing offers valuable and practical insight into its functioning, such as monitoring response times, throughput rates, and resource consumption.
Security Testing
Though security cannot be discounted, functionality and performance remain equally important when testing an app.
Pen testing (also called penetration testing) involves simulating attacks against systems to assess security vulnerabilities; nowadays, automated tools like Synyk can serve this function by scanning code dependencies for vulnerabilities before automatically creating pull requests to address these flaws.
Regression Testing
As important as it is to test new features, regression testing is also critical in monitoring existing ones for any degradation that might have occurred over time.
Regression testing refers to running previously completed tests as part of your pipeline to confirm that changes do not negatively affect existing features or collecting performance metrics like transactions per second (TPS) from production environments and comparing these against metrics from load testing exercises.
Regression testing is critical for maintaining high quality and reliability as your API evolves - regardless of its implementation methods.
Production Traffic Replication
Production Traffic Replication, a suitable alternative to mirroring, provides one of the best methods of putting all these approaches into effect.
In this method, real-world traffic from production environments is recorded and played back later into testing environments for review.
Utilizing current test data ensures the most realistic simulation of API usage scenarios possible, with traffic coming straight out of production being used directly as testing data - providing assurances that every aspect of your API as it exists currently has been thoroughly covered in tests.
Which Best Practices Exist For Automating API Tests?
Implementation of an efficient, reliable, and flexible test automation strategy by API development teams is made possible thanks to these best practices:
Don't Automate Flaky Tests
As previously discussed, two primary benefits of API test automation include time savings and increased productivity.
Teams must exercise caution when choosing which tests to automate. Tests that use intricate logic could produce false positives that waste teams' time troubleshooting nonexistent issues; additionally, false positives might cause test fatigue to go undetected due to repeated false positives; for this reason, couples should only automate simple, uncomplicated tests using retry logic in case failures go undetected.
Reduce The Risk Of Human Error
Manual testing remains indispensable in any development team's workflow, although its results are susceptible to human error.
A developer could misinterpret results during the execution of tests manually; standardizing test execution via API test automation reduces this possibility while increasing confidence and morale among team members.
Run Tests In Parallel
Automated API testing should occur quickly and effectively within continuous testing integration/deployment pipelines, mainly if done as part of continuous delivery (CI/CD).
Every commit will force developers to decide between stopping work or continuing without feedback if an automated test suite takes more than an hour to run, making this decision harder on every commit than necessary. Performing tests concurrently rather than serially may help teams run tests across various operating systems, devices, and browsers without creating bottlenecks in testing schedules.
Use A Testing Tool That Works With The Remainder Of Your Workflow
Fast and effective automated API testing is essential, mainly when it's done inside CI/CD pipelines.
Every commit will force the developer to decide between stopping work and moving forward without feedback if an automated test suite takes an hour to run. Executing test suites in parallel instead of sequentially is one technique to ensure they run as fast as possible. Teams can use this method to run tests across various operating systems, devices, and browsers without creating a bottleneck.
Conclusion
API testing, or application programming interface testing, involves direct and integration testing to evaluate their functionality, dependability, performance, and security.
Testing occurs at the message layer, allowing for quick application logic validation without using visual user interfaces (GUIs).
