June 19, 2020

How to Build a Digital Strategy With API Testing

Automation

APIs — application programming interfaces — are important throughout the development lifecycle. They serve as a bridge between applications, products, and services. Testing APIs is important to ensure quality. Here, we break down what API testing is, how to build a digital strategy, and how to do API testing.

What Is API Testing?

API testing is testing APIs directly and during integration testing to make sure they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security.

Why Testing APIs Is Important

Testing APIs is an important part of your overall digital strategy. That’s because API quality is a fundamental building block to the overall application quality.

API quality is important because it’s behind every button or service on customer facing and internal applications. API testing is important to achieve this. API testing is also a more reliable and stable testing method for an entire application, as opposed to just UI testing.

How to Build a Digital Strategy For Testing

Digital transformation is a reality — and has been important to many businesses. But today it's a necessity. Engagement from the end users across multiple geographies can only be done with a digital strategy. That takes API testing — and other forms of testing, too.

You need to have everything — all of your web applications and mobile applications — working and functioning in a high performance and security manner. Otherwise, your business is simply suffering from business losses.

Focus on building a digital strategy covering the entire range of the testing pyramid. Include unit, API, and UI/UX. This will provide the best digital experience.

This means having a good balance between all of these types of testing activities:

Unit testing.
API testing.
UI/UX testing.

Why API Testing Is Critical

API testing needs to be part of your overall digital strategy.

API testing identifies:

Application functionality issues (e.g., the API is calling a feature that isn’t available).
Application reliability issues (e.g., does the app work consistently?).
Application performance issues (e.g., does the app work under the load?).
Application security issues (e.g., is the data transfer between endpoints secure?).

You could find some of these issues during other types of testing. That’s why it’s important to balance API testing with unit testing and UI/UX testing.

You Need Unit Testing and UI/UX Testing, Too

Unit testing and UI/UX testing need to be part of your digital strategy, too. They complement API testing — and other types of testing.

When you combine all of these activities — and automate them as much as possible — you can shift them left, to earlier in the cycle. This is a best practice to achieve high quality applications.

At the end of the day, you want to have a complete end user experience. That can only be achieved through covering all different types of testing, functional, nonfunctional, UI, and APIs. The best way to do this testing is continuously — with a solution like Perfecto.

5 Best Practices For Testing APIs

Here are five best practices for testing APIs:

Make sure to start with API smoke testing.
Introduce exact conditions in the API testing phase.
Track and save the API responses for the future.
Perform negative testing.
Never ignore security tests.

It’s also a good idea to move your testing to the cloud.

How to Do API Testing

Here’s how to do API testing.

Set up the environment: Generate the API calls in a JSON/Swagger format.
Define the test plan: Create the test scenarios for the specific APIs.
Make an API call: Execute the APIs against the target environment during development cycles (preferably through CI).
Combine data with API tests: Ensure proper coverage of both “happy path” scenarios as well as negative scenarios.
Analyze the API test reports and validate the responses meet the defined test criteria.

Below, you'll see an example of an API test report in Perfecto.

An example of a report from API testing.

How to Do API Testing With Perfecto and Akana

Here’s an example of how to do API testing with Perfecto (a continuous testing platform) and Akana (an API management platform). Watch the video below to see how it works.