In the development of software applications, Application Programming Interface (API) plays a crucial role; it enables communication and data exchange between this software system and other software systems. With API playing such a significant role, testing them becomes extremely important in ensuring the quality and stability of the software. Learn more about the values that API testing brings to the project in the article below.
The Vital Role of APIs
API is the middle layer between UI and the database layer. It supports integration – allowing different applications to collaborate, promoting communication and data exchange between different applications and services thereby helping to reduce and minimize time and effort in development.
Main Components of API
What is API testing
API testing is a software testing practice that tests the APIs directly – from their functionality, reliability, performance, to security. Part of integration testing, API testing effectively validates the logic of the build architecture within a short amount of time.
- Functional testing: This testing involved validating the functionality of an API according to the business logic.
- Validating the Request/Response with various inputs: This includes productivity, Behavior, the efficiency of an API while validating the user inputs and handling the exceptions and limiting the request payload size.
- Usability testing: Verifying whether an API integrates well with another platform as well.
- Security testing: This testing includes what type of authentication is required and whether sensitive data is encrypted over HTTP(s). What level of encryption is done can also be a part of this and also includes Pentesting, Fuzz testing.
- Performance testing: API performance will have a major impact on the app responsiveness. So testers have to make sure that the average response time for an API should be within the limits under various circumstances.
- API design test: As a part of the design test we should validate whether the APIs have been developed with the REST principles or not.
Why API testing is crucial
During project development, the server and client work independently of each other. I can use API testing to test the server first instead of having to wait for the client to finish to start the testing process.
During software testing, when we detect errors related to logic and data, with API testing we can determine whether the error belongs to the server or the client. From there, errors will be resolved sooner.
When working on a project that only provides the System for another partner to use, using API testing becomes necessary because you do not have a Client to interact with.
Reference:
– https://blog.nashtechglobal.com/understanding-api/
– https://blog.nashtechglobal.com/popular-types-of-apis/
– https://blog.nashtechglobal.com/api-testing-containerizing-rest-assured-api-tests-with-docker/