Every product or application today works as an integral element of a complex and growing web of devices and systems that require robust and highly-functional APIs. However, more APIs mean more testing to comprehend if they meet functionality, performance, and security. expectations But taking the manual testing route is rather unreasonable. This is why there is a growing appetite for automated API tests.
What Are Automated API Tests?
The rise in cloud applications and interconnected platforms has put APIs into the spotlight. Since every system or device needs to communicate with others in the ecosystem, API testing has become a critical element of any testing strategy. Through API testing, teams can evaluate and confirm if APIs perform as expected when confronted with a wide variety of favorable (and unfavorable) requests. Not only does API testing test the API’s functionality — but its reliability, performance, and security.
With the number and complexity of APIs surging with each passing day, conducting manual API tests wastes time, effort, and money. Instead, automating the API testing process can result in several distinct benefits, including better quality testing, speed, and testing efficiency.
Automated API tests allow for API testing tasks to be designed and run again and again. By automating a bunch of testing activities, they help prevent human error while simplifying the testing lifecycle. Since automated API tests provide quicker test results, they significantly accelerate the development workflows. As a result, they help teams speed up feedback loops and also catch issues faster.
Why Do Organizations Need Automated API Testing?
There are a bunch of reasons why organizations today must embrace automated API testing:
To Speed Up Testing
One of the biggest drivers for the adoption of automated API tests is to speed up testing. With automated API testing, you can quickly and accurately test your APIs without writing a single line of code. Modern tools and platforms offer a range of templates and snippets that can be mixed and matched to create test suites that fit your unique API testing use case.
To Minimize Error Margins
Since automated API tests are less likely to result in errors, they greatly minimize error margins. By offering teams the ability to run automated tests with more precision frequently, automated API testing helps improve the accuracy of tests and expand test coverage.
To Streamline the Testing Lifecycle
API testing can be a complex endeavor, but not if you can automate and integrate it across your CI/CD pipeline. Modern automated API testing tools allow you to reuse your test suites to create your own CI/CD pipeline or even add them to your existing pipeline – thus streamlining the testing lifecycle.
To Enable Seamless Scaling
Automated API tests also make scaling easy. As software applications grow, the risk of breakage also grows. Automated API testing enables teams to create robust and bug-resistant programs and increase test coverage and frequency. Using modern tools, you can easily set up your automated tests and scale them as your application grows in size and complexity.
To Curtail Testing Costs
Automated API testing also offers a great way to curtail testing costs. Shifting to automated API tests means you spend less on QA. You also experience less lag between development and QA and devote less time to debugging your applications.
What Things Should Teams Keep in Mind While Developing an API Testing Strategy?
Having the right API testing strategy in place can play a massive role in driving the right outcomes. To that end, here are a few things you should keep in mind while developing your automated API testing strategy:
- Identify areas of your application that require API testing and be clear on the aspects you want to test, like response time, performance, security, etc.
- Select and use a tool that allows you to create a range of automated API tests and covers all aspects of the API, including reliability and security
- Test as early and as often as possible to ensure the best performance of your APIs
- Maintain proper and updated documentation to always have insight into what has been tested and what needs to be done next
- Record every change you make to the code, plugins, data formats, API functions, responses, etc.
- Make sure to constantly track testing progress and performance and identify areas of improvement.
- In addition to providing valid data inputs for positive testing, make it a habit to also test the API’s ability to handle negative responses.
How Does ACCELQ Help in Conducting Automated API Tests?
The products and services thatse today rely on hundreds of interconnected APIs. Therefore, rigorous API testing is essential to verify their performance, security, and availability. At ACCELQ, we know how critical it is to stay connected in this digital economy and release products faster. Therefore, we have developed a cloud-enabled, codeless API test automation tool with automated test design, codeless automation logic, complete test management and planning, and 360-degree tracking.
ACCELQ offers algorithmically-driven automated test case generation and an embedded data-driven framework. This allows businesses to parameterize assertions with dynamic data, request payload with parameterized data, and automatically propagate assertions across repeated sets of responses.
With ACCELQ, you can:
- Carry out zero-code API test automation on the cloud and combine it with UI test automation in the same simplified flow
- Seamlessly design, automate, execute and track API regression test plans
- Enable quick and accurate API test case management, test planning, execution, and tracking governance
- Get comprehensive support for SOAP & RESTful services test automation
- Build CI-Driven regression suite executions and efficiently manage your dynamic API environment
- Directly correlate business processes with their corresponding API for complete coverage
- Drive in-sprint automation with seamless UI and API automation and chain API tests for true end-to-end validation
- Leverage an integrated CI workflow to trigger automated API suite regression
Get Your API Testing Strategy Right
If you want to build a robust API testing strategy and accelerate your testing outcomes, you need to take a functional approach to API automation and enable your entire team to automate without the need for specialists. Achieve true and continuous delivery with ACCELQ, and get started on your codeless API test automation journey today!
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