DEVOPSdigest

Sauce Labs acquired API Fortress, a provider of modern API testing solutions for agile and DevOps teams.

The API Fortress platform enables customers to transform their API development processes, accelerate releases, and reduce risk in the software development lifecycle.

With the addition of API Fortress, Sauce Labs now offers an even richer and more comprehensive testing experience, one that includes API testing in addition to functional UI testing, visual end-to-end testing, and front-end performance testing, as well as real-time test insights and analytics.

“Sauce Labs is committed to helping organizations grow their digital confidence by providing them the testing platform they need to deliver a flawless and trusted experience to their customers. Today’s announcement is further evidence of that commitment and we look forward to a bright future for API Fortress and its customers as part of the growing Sauce Labs team.” said Aled Miles, President and CEO, Sauce Labs.

The acquisition of API Fortress complements Sauce Labs existing functional UI testing capabilities by enabling customers to address one of the biggest challenges they typically face with traditional UI testing. Customers running functional UI tests on the Sauce Labs platform will be able to leverage API Fortress to quickly and easily determine if there are issues at the API level that require a more targeted set of API tests, and if so, to generate and execute those tests using a powerful set of API testing capabilities available directly from Sauce Labs.

“As functional UI testing and targeted API testing go hand-in-hand in the modern era of API-driven applications, Sauce Labs is the perfect long-term home for all that we started building at API Fortress,” said Patrick Poulin, co-founder and CEO, API Fortress, who will join the Sauce Labs product leadership team.

In the early days of application development, web applications made just a small number of API requests to required microservices. With fewer API endpoints to track down, a functional test failure caused by an out-of-date API was relatively easy to identify and debug, making the need for targeted API testing far less acute. As modern software development has progressed, however, web apps have become far more API-driven, and the number of APIs communicating with various microservices has exploded.

In the absence of targeted API testing, QA teams generally have no way of knowing whether a front-end functional test has failed due to a broken endpoint or a bug in the application code itself, meaning the arduous and time-consuming task of identifying and debugging the failure falls to developers. Deployments can grind to a halt while developers chase down broken services they’re not responsible for maintaining. But with API testing as part of a comprehensive continuous testing platform, testers and developers gain immediate insight into how and when APIs break.

“As modern web apps continue to become more API-driven than ever before, developers and QA professionals must collaborate around the API to build high-quality applications, including and especially when it comes to testing,” said John Kelly, CTO, Sauce Labs. “The acquisition of API Fortress adds another tool to the Sauce Labs portfolio that facilitates greater collaboration between testers and developers and is yet another proof point of the significant investment we’re making to support the developer community.”

API testing with API Fortress enables customers and partners to significantly shorten test sprints, improve code quality, and monitor functional uptime. The API Fortress platform features an API design that enables it to easily integrate with the tools integral to building and testing APIs and to seamlessly mesh with existing DevOps toolchains. API Fortress empowers developers to work in parallel with QA and testing teams throughout the API lifecycle.

The API Fortress platform gives customers the ability to:

- Easily create and edit functional tests. API Fortress users can automatically generate their first API test in seconds.

- Monitor performance, uptime, and functional uptime of live APIs. API Fortress users can accurately track the true uptime of APIs through functional tests and quickly diagnose API problems before they are discovered by end-users or cybercriminals.

- Build API mocks manually or automatically from live API traffic. API Fortress users can expedite new API deliveries and minimize the effects of unreliable internal environments with API mocking.

- Create a Load Test in as little as 15 seconds. API Fortress unifies functional and nonfunctional API testing, allowing users to use existing functional tests as load tests.