API TESTING is a software testing type that validates Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The purpose of API Testing is to check the functionality, reliability, performance, and security of the programming interfaces. In API Testing, instead of using standard user inputs(keyboard) and outputs, you use software to send calls to the API, get output, and note down the system’s response. API tests are very different from GUI Tests and won’t concentrate on the look and feel of an application. It mainly concentrates on the business logic layer of the software architecture.
There are three levels of API testing:
Functional Testing: Provides input parameters in JSON or XML Payload. Functional Testing provides a response code and response body within a millisecond.
Load Testing: Checks performance under load and helps determine how much traffic the system can handle before being overloaded.
Security Testing: This shows which type of authentication is required and whether sensitive data is encrypted over HTTP and includes penetration testing for validating authentication.
Advantages of API Testing:
API testing will provide truly secure, reliable, and scalable connections between platforms. In every Company, they maintain standard practice to monitor API’s during production to ensure that the live endpoints are up and returning expected information to the user.
- Having access to the application without a user interface. This provides QA Engineers with early insight into defects and errors.
- Testing the code-level functionality of an application provides an early evaluation of its overall build strength before running GUI tests.
- API test automation requires less code than GUI automated tests thus providing faster test results and better test coverage. The result of faster testing is a reduction in overall testing costs.
- In an API test, the data is interchanged using XML or JSON and compromised of HTTP requests and responses. These all are technology independent and used for development.
Contribution by Feroz Shaikh Stayed tuned to my upcoming SOAIS blog where I will explain with an example about API Testing Integrating Worksoft certify with Python.
Pics Credit: Google Image
