Why is API testing important?

When you are releasing a product all forms of software is essential to identify bugs and inconsistencies both, and as you make sure it continues to work when it’s out to production. It’s very clear that the risk of putting a bad and especially insecure product on the market is greater than the cost to test it.

There are 3 critical ways that your company will benefit from including API test in your development process.

1. Test Quality

If you wait until after development to build your API tests, you’ll naturally build them to be biased toward favorable test cases. Once an API or piece of software is built, you’re focused on how it’s supposed to perform instead of the other, equally likely scenarios, in which it will fail. Plus, much like iterating on software during development, iterating on API tests will only make them stronger and more comprehensive, which will benefit the team in the long term, raise the product (or API) quality and will decrease the number of faults that were to be found in the future.

2. Test Coverage

Covering all the bases of potential software failures is a critical component to maintaining quality product and customer trust. API testing during development can reveal issues with your API, server, other services, network and more that you may not discover or solve easily after deployment. Once your software is out in production, you’ll build more tests to account for new and evolved use cases. Those tests, in addition to the ones you built during development, keep you covered for nearly any fail scenario, which keeps QA and customer support teams from being bombarded with support tickets.

3. Test Reuse

One of the best reasons to create API tests in the early stages is the rewards you’ll feel after deployment in that the bulk of your tests are already taken care of. For instance, Runscope allows you to reuse the same tests in multiple environments, duplicate and share tests. Your dev and QA teams build tests and use them in dev and staging environments, then your DevOps teams can reuse those same tests and run them on a schedule in production to monitor those use cases. DevOps then iterates and adds more tests, which can be reused by dev and QA teams when building out new endpoints. Reusing API tests across the development lifecycle facilitates collaboration among teams and provides a more comprehensive and accurate testing canon.