Modern software applications typically consist of three main layers: the Data layer, the API (or service) layer, and the User Interface (UI) layer. The API layer contains the business logic of the application. Effectively, this means how users interact with the services and functions within the application. To that end, this begs the question - Why is API automation critical in today's development environment? Besides the business logic, API automation testing focuses on the application's security and responses. Further, API automation is crucial for continuous testing for DevOps and Development teams.
Importance and benefits of API automation testing
With API automation testing, application developers can initiate software testing early in the development phase — much before UI or functional testing. While unit and regression testing are important, they do not validate the API functionality or cover back-end testing entirely.
Oftentimes, major software bugs delay product releases and require large-scale code modification. API testing is crucial as it can detect most software bugs before they become significant issues.
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API automation testing is also an integral part of any Agile development environment. That's because API testing can provide instant feedback for the process flow. Hence, for Agile projects, API testing is preferred over GUI testing.
So to better elucidate API testing prowess, here are some of the benefits of API automation testing:
- Requires lesser coding, thus improving speed and lowering costs of software testing.
- Enables developers to resolve application errors (even before UI development).
- Provides high-quality application testing under extreme conditions.
- It can be easily integrated into UI testing.
With more applications now relying on API-based integration, there is a growing industry demand for automation testing. Here is how ACCELQ can help application companies improve their API test automation.
SUGGESTED READ - What is API testing?
How to use ACCELQ for API automation tool testing
ACCELQ provides continuous testing for both API and UI elements as a cloud-based testing platform. It offers a codeless approach to API test automation. Moreover, the ACCELQ platform can design test cases for reusability and modularity with its design-first approach.
Following is a rundown of some ways how ACCELQ can provide comprehensive API automation testing:
- Supports a comprehensive technology stack comprising the latest web technologies and legacy systems.
- Offers a simple and unified approach to back-end test automation with support for database systems, messaging queues, and mainframe systems.
- Supports the creation of both UI and API test cases, thus achieving complete automation across the entire technology stack.
- Configures API testing that includes endpoints, headers, parametrization, and body (if required).
- Creates API tests to verify the status code, response, and response headers with a few clicks.
- Provides native integration with leading DevOps tools, including Jira and Bamboo.
- Provides out-of-the-box support for Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality.
Organizations configure their Oracle Cloud application according to their specific business requirement. Following any quarterly update, Oracle testing teams must focus on validating their existing configuration before leveraging any new product features. This is necessary to ensure that the latest update does not lead to any unexpected behavior in your application configuration.
Moreover, organizations must test their key business processes for the new Oracle Cloud update. Business process testing must include the execution and navigation steps, along with the variety of business functions and user roles.
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Next, let us look at the capabilities that ACCELQ provides for API testing.
About ACCELQ API Testing
ACCELQ provides a 360-degree approach to API testing, including an end-to-end flow for validating UI and APIs. This enables a high level of usability within a single platform.
Here are some of the supported services for back-end API testing:
- SOAP and RESTful services
- Messaging services including Apache Active MQ, TIBCO, and IBM MG
- Database services for MySQL, Oracle, and Postgres
- Enterprise message bus including protocols like TCP, HTTP, SOAP, FTP, Anypoint MQ, and CMIS
A sneak peek into ACCELQ API Automate: Codeless API Test Automation
With ACCELQ, developers can create a context (specific to the service) and develop a test logic like for any UI-based context. Furthermore, ACCELQ provides comprehensive support for testing RESTful services. In the same vein, the following are the basic steps involved in the automated testing of RESTful services.
1. Define the REST connection
Firstly, define the REST API connection with the name and base URL.
2. Invoke REST calls
The next step is to invoke the REST calls using the following services: RESTful GET service, RESTful POST service, RESTful POST service using the Form Input Data Payload, RESTful PUT service, RESTful PUT service using the Form Input Data Payload, RESTful PATCH service, and RESTful DELETE service.
3. Verify the REST response
The third step is to verify the REST response using:
- The Header value from the REST response
- The Response status code is a specific value for a given RESTful Request
- The node value in the REST response is an expected text
- The node value in the REST response does not match the text value
SUGGESTED READ - Best Practices to Perform Rest API Testing
Why is ACCELQ the most reliable platform for API automation testing?
In summary, ACCELQ expedites a codeless approach to API test automation that is seamlessly integrated with UI (or functional) testing.
The following reasons further act as a testament to why ACCELQ is the best platform:
- Codeless cloud-based API test automation
- Automation testing of both API and UI with a simplified flow
- Regression executions built for continuous improvement
- API test case management along with test planning, execution, and tracking
- Correlates business process with the corresponding API
- API testing with regression maturity
ACCELQ Supports the following technologies:
- Database systems: MySQL, Oracle
- GraphQL, JMS, and Tibco
- RESTful web services: JSON RAML Swagger, Open API WADL SOA / Web services, XML WSDL, XML Schema SOAP, PoX (Plain XML), GZIP WS Standards
- Microservices: Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQTT, AMQP Protobuf WebSockets
With ACCELQ, companies can achieve:
- 3x faster speed for API Test Regression
- Continuous delivery with API and UI validations thanks to in-sprint automation
- 70% lesser effort in test automation
Conclusion
To summarize, companies can choose from multiple API testing tools available in the market. However, there is no "silver bullet" solution to API automation testing. To that end, ACCELQ aims to integrate UI and API testing and the benefits of codeless automation and continuous improvement.
Over 1 million business processes have so far been automated on the ACCELQ testing platform.
Would you like to learn how it works? Schedule a product demo today!
Yuvarani Elankumaran
Technical Consultant | ACCELQ
Yuvarani Elankumaran is a highly skilled technical consultant at ACCELQ. With over a decade of experience in the field of Test Automation, Yuvarani is a seasoned professional who is well-versed in a variety of programming languages and automation frameworks.
