What is API testing?
APIs play a pivotal role in modern software architecture, thanks to the API-first approach to software development taken by many organizations today. From a functional standpoint, APIs enable different software components to communicate and exchange data.
Importance
Since effective testing contributes to robust software development, this type of testing ensures that different parts of an app work together. This makes API testing essential for delivering reliable and well-integrated apps. With today’s software interoperability requirements driving an API-first approach, it’s vital that developers continuously test their endpoints with the objective of offering their customers a seamless digital experience.
Purpose & Types of Testing
API testing evaluates the behavior and performance of application programming interfaces to see if they work as intended. It consists of a battery of tests that scrutinize aspects such as:
- Request handling
- Data integrity
- Missing or duplicate functionality
- Security measures
- Reliability issues
- Error handling
- Response time
- Multithreaded issues
- Security and performance issues
Also, API testing involves several types of tests: contract, end-to-end, unit, load, integration, functional and security testing. Testing involves running various automated tests and manual inspections on API methods. These simulate interactions to find bugs and inconsistencies long before the application is deployed to production. Some of these API methods include GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and which will be used heavily once customers begin using the application.
Benefits
As for the benefits of carrying out API testing, the ability to test core functionality earlier helps build a bug-free and user-friendly application. Not requiring a user interface in order to conduct this type of testing is another advantage. Also, an improvement in security, performance, functionality and integration can prevent poor performance or even system failure.
Finally, conducting API testing is far more effective as it occurs during development, and where finding bugs is far less expensive. When all these benefits are put together, this makes the API easy to use, has sufficient documentation and returns useful error messages. This guarantees adoption among developers or customers.
Challenges
On the other hand, there are challenges associated with API testing. These include:
- Grappling with complexity when testing multiple APIs
- Experiencing limited visibility when it comes evaluating how APIs work with other components
- Assessing performance, scalability and security can be difficult
- Writing and executing test scripts for APIs take much longer
- Finding sufficient documentation to test APIs accurately is a rarity
- Achieving maximum test coverage is not possible since several scenarios cannot be tested yet
- Spending on automated API testing tools can be costly
When it comes to testing APIs, engineers must remember to build a local environment that encourages anonymity and confidentiality. Where setting up, configuring and debugging said API is effortless. Common API testing tools include Postman, SOAPUI, TestStudio, OWASP ZAP and Rest Assured.
