Today, teams or companies either have their own application programming interfaces (APIs) or use APIs from one or more vendors. If you haven't encountered an API in application testing, it is only a matter of time.
Think about how the API works. If you want to get the weather today, you can get it without consulting anyone. No manual intervention is required, all processed by software. But user experience is a necessary condition to retain customers. The market-accepted API enables suppliers to have an easily scalable platform from which to develop their business.
Of course, you can also be an API provider. Does the service quality and performance of your API meet customer needs? Is there sufficient documentation to enable the application to call your service reliably? If the input format is incorrect or incomplete, is sufficient error handling protocol provided?
Any company with data or market position that can be disclosed to other companies has an API. And they are all using API to build their own business. The company must ensure that the API meets its quality and performance standards.
Generally, there are two modern methods of calling external services. The first is the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP provides a clearly defined method for accessing services using a SOAP front-end via HTTP transport. The second method is to simply publish the calling convention of RESTful or other interfaces to the service. Many organizations have migrated to the Representational State Transfer (REST) interface, which also allows users of the API to call services using HTTP.
Companies that provide APIs often sell advanced services through APIs, so it is necessary to charge users for additional services or functions provided through APIs. Additional testing may be required to ensure that users get the services they are paying for.
As a test team, you know that your website meets internal standards. However, the participation of third-party code and even other services within the organization makes the testing process more difficult. You must test when the code changes, and you may have to perform more tests when the partner’s code changes.
There are several tools available for testing APIs. LoadUI, an API load testing product, and service virtualization with ServiceV Pro tools. Testers can perform a series of testing activities on application and service endpoints. In fact, from the perspective of providers and users, API performance is very important. The provider is the provider of service quality, and the user is the provider who ensures that the goals of the entire application can be met.
In addition, Eolinker has provided API testing for several years. Eolinker enables you to perform automated testing, including API and SOAP interfaces. It provides function, load and security testing, as well as interface test data management. In addition, it enables testers to perform end-to-end testing across multiple endpoints (such as web services, databases, etc.).
If you are using the Microsoft platform, you can also perform API testing through Visual Studio. It mainly contains load testing of the interface, although you can also functionally test SOAP endpoints to ensure that they expect appropriate input and can handle malformed data.
Whether it is a published API or a SOAP interface, testers cannot ignore them. This is the reality of today's customer-oriented software. Whether it is to provide an API or use an API, it is an integral part of the application infrastructure. If you don't know what API your application is using or exposing, then your testing team needs to figure it out and provide appropriate functionality and load testing services. Translation: www.eolinker.com