Asha KR & Shwetha DJ, Intel Security
A right testing strategy for Application Programming Interface (API) is crucial for developing a successful product. However, many businesses fail to see a complete picture during project management phase. Changes in product and project requirements are inevitable, which can potentially disrupt the timelines or quality of the product. Eventually, more time and resources are required to accommodate the change requests. It is challenging to deliver a good quality product to the end users in such situations. Testing of API after it integrated with the UI is not an easy task especially when we deliver a quality software as a service to our customers and partners.
API driven testing is a testing framework that uses a programming interface and the application to validate the behavior under test. Typically API driven testing overcomes application user interface altogether. API driven testing is also being widely used by software testers as it serves additional benefits as compared to other testing strategies. Programmers or testers write scripts using a programming or scripting language that calls interface exposed by the application under test. These interfaces are custom built or commonly available interfaces like COM, HTTP. Present development world changes every day with new technologies and this is directly proportional to UI changes. In this era we cannot rely only on UI testing for functional verification. The test scripts created are executed using an automation framework to compare test results with expected behavior of the API. The journey was more challenging while bringing up a startup project to a stabilized API automation framework with fair number of test cases automated in it. There were many initiatives and ideas put forth for converting manual testing to stabilized automation testing.
Outcome of API automation is increased test coverage by 100% with quality deliverables. 20% of early detection of defects and scope for manual testers increased to become Test Automation Engineers. There are nightly builds running with automation for Build Validation and Functional Validation, which has helped testers pitching in early defect analyses with in less time.
Target Audience: Introductory
2015 Technical Paper, Asha KR & Shwetha DJ, Paper, Slides, Notes, Video.
