API Automation Testing with ACCELQ – Why and How?
Automating API testing brings significant benefits to the overall outcome of testing efforts, right from early detection of bugs, to increased test case reusability, and ruling out human errors. API test automation also facilitates the development of API products quickly and efficiently thus saving time and resources in the long run. Here are some fundamentals.
Understanding APIs
APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces are behind-the-scenes elements that allow software applications to communicate with each other. Say when you open an app on your mobile, the API passes on the login information to the backend of the application and fetches back the data you see on your screen. Two main types of APIs are:
- RESTful APIs are those APIs who are easy to work with and use HTTP methods to perform tasks. RESTful APIs talk to the server for data requests, and it fetches it back to the user.
- SOAP APIs are usually protocol-based and use XML for sending and receiving messages. They are super- secure and are sharp with error-checking.
- If RESTful APIs function like librarians, SOAP APIs behave like bank vaults. They are secure, reliable, and yet complex to work with.
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What is API Automation Testing?
API test automation ensures that the APIs, the building blocks of software, function as they are supposed to. The objective is to primarily ensure the APIs function correctly, features are validated and are improving the efficiency of the testing process. API test automation provides faster feedback, reduces manual effort, increases test coverage, and can be integrated into the CI/CD pipeline. This also leads to notable cost savings in the long run.
API automation testing prevents occurrences of major software bugs that often cause delays in product releases and necessitate extensive code modifications. These bugs can be detected early, and their impact can be easily mitigated to ensure a smooth development process. Particularly in agile development environments, API automation testing provides instant feedback on the process flow, allowing developers to make changes on time. This is why API testing is preferred over GUI testing for Agile projects, as it promotes quicker and more efficient development cycles.
Benefits of API Test Automation:
- Automating API testing requires less coding, and this improves the speed and lowers costs of testing software applications.
- Developers can begin to resolve application errors even before the UI is developed.
- It brings about greater accuracy as automated tests can be run more frequently and with more precision than manual testing.
- Automated testing can help with larger coverage of functionality over manual tests.
- It is cost effective in the long run, easy to maintain and it can provide faster feedback.
- The chances of errors with Automated tests over manual tests run by DevOps and provides high quality of application testing even in extreme conditions.
How to perform API Test Automation?
- Select the right API test automation Tool: These API testing tools help you to send requests to your API and validate the responses.
- Understand the API documentation clearly to understand its functionalities. Be clear with endpoints, request methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.), request parameters, and expected responses.
- Now, based on the API documentation, create test cases covering possible scenarios, including positive testing (valid inputs), negative testing (invalid inputs), and edge case testing.
- The next step is to execute these test cases using the selected tool. This will now help send requests to the API endpoints and thereby validate the responses against the expected results.
- Integrate your API tests with your CI/CD pipeline; this will help ensure that the tests are executed automatically whenever there are changes made to the API.
- Post execution of tests, the results can be analyzed to identify any failures or issues and the same can be reported to the development team for resolution.
How to use ACCELQ for API Automation Testing?
ACCELQ provides a no-code continuous testing for both API and UI elements as a cloud-based testing platform. The ACCELQ platform can design test cases for reusability and modularity with its design-first approach. Following is a rundown of some ways how ACCELQ can provide comprehensive API automation testing:
- Supports a comprehensive technology stack comprising the latest web technologies and legacy systems.
- Offers a simple and unified approach to back-end test automation with support for database systems, messaging queues, and mainframe systems.
- Supports the creation of both UI and API test cases, thus achieving complete automation across the entire technology stack.
- Configures API testing that includes endpoints, headers, parametrization, and body (if required).
- Creates API tests to verify the status code, response, and response headers with a few clicks.
- Provides native integration with leading DevOps tools, including Jira and Bamboo.
- Provides out-of-the-box support for Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality.
- ACCELQ provides a 360-degree approach to API testing, including an end-to-end flow for validating UI and APIs. This enables a high level of usability within a single platform.
Here are some of the supported services for back-end API testing:
- SOAP and RESTful services
- Messaging services including Apache Active MQ, TIBCO, and IBM MG
- Database services for MySQL, Oracle, and Postgres
- Enterprise message bus including protocols like TCP, HTTP, SOAP, FTP, Anypoint MQ, and CMIS.
- Developers can create a context (specific to the service) and develop a test logic like for any UI-based context. Furthermore, ACCELQ provides comprehensive support for testing RESTful services.
In summary, ACCELQ expedites a codeless approach to API test automation that is seamlessly integrated with UI (or functional) testing.
The following reasons further act as a testament to why ACCELQ is the best platform:
- Codeless cloud-based API test automation
- Automation testing of both API and UI with a simplified flow.
- Regression executions built for continuous improvement.
- API test case management along with test planning, execution, and tracking
- Correlates business process with the corresponding API
- API testing with regression maturity
ACCELQ Supports the following technologies:
- Database systems: MySQL, Oracle
- GraphQL, JMS, and Tibco
- RESTful web services: JSON RAML Swagger, Open API WADL SOA / Web services, XML WSDL, XML Schema SOAP, PoX (Plain XML), GZIP WS Standards
- Microservices: Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQTT, AMQP Protobuf WebSockets
Conclusion
Several development teams have switched to the API-first approach, where software applications are built by linking together several different APIs. This product-centric framework emphasizes the functionality brought by external services through APIs. With teams racing to unveil products quickly and as well as efficiently, continuous, and effective API testing automation, can significantly improve the QA process and lead to higher quality in software releases.
While there are several API testing tools that are available in the market; ACCELQ stands apart as it aims to integrate UI and API testing and the benefits of codeless automation and continuous improvement.
Yuvarani Elankumaran
Technical Consultant at ACCELQ
Yuvarani Elankumaran is a highly skilled technical consultant at ACCELQ. With over a decade of experience in the field of Test Automation, Yuvarani is a seasoned professional who is well-versed in a variety of programming languages and automation frameworks.
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