With the rise in cloud applications and interconnect platforms, API testing has become a necessity. Many services that we use every day rely on hundreds of interconnected APIs, if any one of them fails the service will malfunction.
Reveal bugs, inconsistencies, or deviations from the expected behavior to make sure things work as expected in every predictable scenario.
Types of API Testing
Functional testing: Here the system is tested against the functional requirements and specifications of a feature in question. Functional testing ensures that the requirements or specifications are properly satisfied by the application. This is particularly concerned with the result of API processing and focuses on simulating actual system usage.
Validation Testing: Validation testing comes into action at the final stage and has an important role in any development/testing scenario. It is conducted to verify the aspects of a product, behavior, and efficiency. Put it simply, validation testing provides you an assurance of precise development.
Runtime and error detection: An API testing process that analyzes an API call as it executes and reports defects that are detected during the execution. This is related to the actual running of the API — with the universal results of utilizing the API codebase. It mainly focuses on monitoring, execution errors, resource leaks, or error detection.
UI Testing: UI testing majorly focuses on the user interface which ties into the API. It provides an overview of the health, usability, and efficiency of the app’s front end.
Load Testing: This is can be termed as one of the last testing activities around any API. It is conducted when the codebase is complete and ready for the users to consume. With the help of this API we can define if an API or set of APIs including the entire system can bear the load of x amount of users.
Penetration Testing: Penetration testing is the auditing process to verify if your APIs are coupled properly. Simply put, it is a simulated cyberattack against your system to check for exploitable vulnerabilities.
Fuzz Testing: Fuzz is another security audit. In fuzz testing, a huge amount of random data/strings ("noise" or "fuzz") is injected into the system to detect crashes or strange behaviors.
Security Testing: It ensures secure API implementation and helps figure out the possibility of external threats. Security testing also includes steps such as validation of encryption and the design of the API access control. It also includes user rights management and authorization validation.