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3. What is Continuous Testing?

API testing isn’t easy, and there are many different ways in which a bad API can cause catastrophic harm to an organization. We will dive into best practices and details a little later, but let’s quickly run through what we’re talking about when it comes to continuous testing.

As a reference point, this is what a normal HTTP based REST API, with a JSON output looks like. Each of these types of testing are part of a continuous testing strategy. They cover a good amount, and we do our best to explain them, but keep in mind terminology and definitions are always evolving.

Functional Testing

Looking at the API above, you see a payload with various objects. The first item you should be testing is that the API responds as expected from a functional standpoint.

This means every object exists, and the responses are within expected ranges. For example the quantity object should always be a whole number. There can’t be .5 baseball caps.

Validating Business Logic

Imagine you are an ecommerce company with a product API, similar to the one we shared. First, you should be testing that each product has all the objects it expects.

The next layer is where skill and creativity in test creation are required. Let’s say that you search for ‘red’ and you receive both shoes and pants. Now all products should contain a size object, but they are very different size ranges. Adding the intelligence to a test that says, “If this is a pair of shoes, size should be between 4 and 17.” That is business logic validation. This is where you need a skilled team that knows the expectations of the API, and how to manipulate and validate them.

End-to-End / Integration Testing

APIs are meant to interact with one another, and that flow has to work in its entirety. By creating proper integration tests you can validate flows that resemble actual users behaviors. For example, creating a single test that can
Search > Pick a Size > Add to Cart> Checkout

For many companies that entire flow can be done on the API level, and should be. This allows you to confirm that when you add a product to cart, it actually works.

Monitoring

Monitoring is probably the most valuable, and yet underused, type of testing. APIs issues are often only found in live environments when using live data.

The goal of a proper monitoring strategy is to go beyond measuring uptime, but also measuring functional uptime. An API can return a statuscode of 200 and still be failing. We have even seen APIs built so that even when there is an error it returns as a 200. What’s important to note is that you can use existing functional tests as your monitor. With the right platform choice, you can schedule them to run against live environments in certain intervals. Then use that monitoring to have a real-time status page across departments.

Load Testing

This is fairly easy to understand. Make sure your APIs perform when under the stress of a lot of users. This can help find memory leaks, or under performing databases.

It’s also important, again, to use existing tests as your load tests. You will never have 10,000 concurrent users only performing a single call. They will perform different types of calls, or a series of calls with some randomness. Use existing functional and end-to-end tests.

A Summary

Ultimately, continuous testing means leveraging all of these types of tests, automatically. A constant series of functional and non-functional (performance) tests to constantly validate your APIs.