What Are Some API Testing Best Practices?

Structurizing the Test Groups:

• It is to organize test cases by functionality, this will help to improve maintainability and provide a comprehensive overview of the application’s status.
• It engages all stakeholders to define clear requirements in framing the API workflows.

Testing in different test environments:

• In order to ensure your testing environment closely mirrors the production setup to thoroughly evaluate API requests, it is tested in dev environment, staging environment and then finally pushed to production environment.
• Starting from development to deployment, the APIs are tested and end to end testing is also carried out to catch errors at the earliest and provide quality software to end users.
• The testing team has to carefully lay out the testing strategy and have a clear vision on how much testing has to be done in each level of testing.

Automating testing when required:

• When API test automation is done correctly, it helps in standardizing test executions. It lets the development teams follow agile methodology effectively and push the APIs to the production environment without breaking. Automating tests when needed will help the teams save time, cost and accelerate testing.
• The team should have a clear picture of which test to automate and reduce complexity in automation.
• It helps in reusability of the test and reduces manual effort, supports continuous testing and shift left testing. This ensures a more stable CI/CD pipeline.

Consider parallel testing:

• Running test cases or test suites parallelly, that is simultaneously will help in better test coverage and also help the testing team in delivering continuous feedback.
• It also provides the benefit to test in multiple different devices and browser combinations.

Comprehensive Test Coverage:

• It is important to categorize and prioritize API function calls to ensure efficiency while testing. The testing should choose the testing tool or platform wisely. Creating a checklist will also help in organizing the API testing process.
• Planning well-sequenced calls and creating test cases for all possible input combinations will help achieve thorough test coverage.