DEVOPSdigest

Parasoft partnered with Curiosity Software Ireland, specialist provider in model-based test automation. The collaboration provides customers with a rigorous approach for testing today’s complex chains of API calls, combining the companies’ products and technologies to make it easier to navigate the speed and unpredictability of modern software delivery.

Although APIs provide businesses with modern flexibility to innovate rapidly and deliver new offerings to market, this flexibility has also brought new complexities to software testing, and it can be daunting for testers to understand all of the business rules and flow logic needed to test an organization’s APIs thoroughly. To solve this challenge, Curiosity and Parasoft have joined forces. Curiosity’s model-based approach to test design helps users get going quickly, using intuitive flowcharts that mirror the complex business logic of the organization’s APIs. The quick-to-build flowcharts, in turn, enable the auto-generation of tests and data to cover every possible scenario. Testers can then leverage these models in the Parasoft ecosystem, where they benefit from smart test automation, generating comprehensive API test scenarios and virtual services, before rapidly spinning up test environments and executing the complete test suite.

"The logical complexity of API calls makes them perfect for the combination of model-based testing and test data management," explained Huw Price, Managing Director of Curiosity. "The partnership between Parasoft and Curiosity introduces all of the benefits of model-based test generation to API testing. You can auto-generate the optimized test scripts, data, and virtual data needed to test APIs rigorously in-sprint, even when faced with vastly complex chains of API calls."

The solution also extends beyond API test creation – to ensure continuous delivery, test environments need to be able to support API testing agility, and this is where Parasoft's service virtualization technology can be used to simulate components that are unstable, unavailable, or outside of the tester's control. The integration with Curiosity enables a model-based approach to virtual service design, allowing users to define realistic service behavior and then generate complete virtual data to power the realistic simulated service.

"By combining forces with Curiosity, we are providing another way for testers to keep pace with development by continuing to make it easier to shift-left testing to the moment design and development begins," said Mark Lambert, VP of Products at Parasoft. "By making it as easy as possible, integrating Curiosity’s model-based approach into the breadth of the Parasoft Continuous Quality tool suite, testers can easily generate realistic test cases and virtual services that enable the organization to deliver on the promises of Agile and DevOps."