API testing is a special kind of software checkup. It will help you determine whether your application is reliable, secure, and high-performing or will reveal its weaknesses. This type of testing provides faster and more cost-effective error detection than GUI testing, which makes it especially beneficial for development companies.
Moreover, Application Programming Interface doesn’t need to be tested manually by writing a custom code. This is exactly the area where test automation is widely used and yields multiple benefits, about which you can read in detail on https://zapple.tech/services/api-server-side-test-automation/. It adds another reason for you to consider incorporating API testing into your company, and we are going to expand this list even further.
What Advantages do you get when choosing API Testing?
Basically, API testing is compared with UI testing, which focuses on user experience rather than on the service layer of an application. API testing, on the contrary, checks the validity of rules set for user interaction with the functionality of the app and reveals non-compliance with the expected behavior. API testers do these checks by sending certain requests and assessing responses received from the app, so they don’t really interact with its UI.
As such, you gain the following benefits by turning to API testing:
- You do not need to wait for a graphical user interface to be ready, so the testing can kick in earlier.
- With API tests, rendering and loading require less time, which accelerates the whole testing process.
- Since it doesn’t take long to conduct the tests, the overall testing costs are also slashed.
- You will obtain test results faster and will be able to fix identified problems in earlier stages of development before they snowball into a complete disaster.
- The timely detection of bugs leads to a reduced number of modifications required and, thus, to expense trimming.
- Other benefits that go hand in hand with cutting back on fixes are more efficient resource management and the boosted productivity of your development team.
- API testing can ensure the end-to-end validation of app functionality, thus going beyond unit testing or verifying only integrations.
- While GUIs often change throughout the development, resulting in multiple adjustments to tests, API interfaces don’t alter that frequently, and tests can be quickly adapted based on API specifications. In fact, you are free to test several versions of your API simultaneously, with all time savings attached.
All in all, you get fast, thorough, and cost-effective testing, which will save your development team from multiple code rewritings and, in the end, will help you launch your app within a shorter time.
What Errors API Testing helps to Fix
As explained above, running API tests is necessary to check the business logic of an application. There can be many errors here, for example:
- failure to properly address error conditions;
- lack of functionality;
- duplication of functionality;
- security issues;
- performance issues;
- incorrectly structured responses and many other errors.
For the business logic of your application to work smoothly, your company needs to detect and remove such bugs with the help of API testing.