DEVOPSdigest

SmartBear Software has released Ready! API TestServer, a new automated API testing solution which allows developers to find bugs faster and speed the delivery of reliable, robust APIs.

Agile and DevOps teams face immense pressure to release new versions faster than ever before. To meet this challenge, developers look for flexible technologies that help them automate aspects of design, testing and deployment. It is particularly important to test APIs, as they represent the critical building blocks of business functions and revenue streams.

According to Gartner , “The need for API testing and service virtualization is becoming increasingly important as IT organizations develop bimodal capability to support mobile, digital business transformation initiatives and the Internet of Things (IoT). The rapid adoption of agile and SOA-based solutions to support business agility demands that development and test organizations change approaches and tools to drive a broader, more accurate view of complex system quality.”

Ready! API TestServer, the latest addition to SmartBear’s API quality platform, provides a new approach to automated API testing that simplifies activities between developers and testing engineers. Now, both developers and testing experts can:

- Express tests as code to integrate functional testing earlier in development cycles

- Dynamically generate test recipes through scripts and other frameworks

- Execute parallel testing processes on a consolidated set of resources

“The way our customers deliver APIs is changing.” said John Purcell, VP of Products, API Readiness at SmartBear. “Particularly in the enterprise, it’s not enough to ship a well-designed API. You need to prove its accuracy, its resilience and its scalability to both internal and external stakeholders. Simply put, when you provide developers an easy way to test an API before handing it off, you reduce future cost and risk. That is the primary intent of our new product, TestServer, which has exciting implications for our forward-thinking customers.”

Ready! API TestServer provides multiple options for constructing and executing tests to validate API correctness and reliability. Developers using TestServer can use the tools they are familiar with, code in IDEs and scripted commands, to develop test “recipes” that can be used to perform automated regression testing after each build.

For example, client libraries for Java allow developers who are already using jUnit for unit testing to now conduct functional validation using Java code as part of their integration testing phase. Automating both unit and functional testing with real data allows enterprise developers to catch bugs otherwise missed by unit testing under isolated conditions.

After developers run integration tests, these “recipes” can be reused by QA in other Ready! API desktop tools to verify functional, performance and security characteristics of APIs. Likewise, automation engineers can also include test recipes written for TestServer into their continuous integration (CI) environments. Finally, operations teams can use these tests to monitor APIs in production environments and confirm end-to-end quality of deployed applications and services.

Ready! API TestServer represents itself as a Swagger-defined REST API, making it easy for developers and continuous integration systems to integrate it into various software delivery workflows. Ready! API TestServer can be installed on Linux-based or Windows servers anywhere in the world. Whether teams require a cloud-native or on premise continuous delivery pipeline, TestServer fits neatly into existing software delivery toolchains.