Why Do API Virtualization and Service Virtualization Require Testing?

Customer acquisition is a fundamental part of business. If potential customers visiting a webpage cannot view it in full, or cannot perform actions of their preference within seconds as few as 10, they would exit and most likely not return.

An extensive study highlighted by the Telegraph claims that the attention span of human beings has dropped even further. “The results showed the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000, or around the time the mobile revolution began, to eight seconds. Goldfish, meanwhile, are believed to have an attention span of nine seconds.” writes Telegraph.

Testing ensures that such problems are mitigated and preferably, even eradicated. According to a study done, improved software quality and sharing of knowledge across teams are the biggest benefits of working in agile methodology. Agile methodology is increasingly being applied to various software functionalities. The methodology has also been applied to application programming interfaces (APIs).

In this period of lean and agile methodologies, it is important to note that API virtualization is not mocking; it carries an identical functionality and performance as the actual API, at any given time.

An API can reformulate an organization’s entire range of service offerings. API virtualization aims to replicate the minimum behaviour of one or more API endpoints. It is an easy, affordable, and efficient way to test APIs. Such API virtualization involves the testing, development and operations teams to deliver great APIs.

Following are the advantages of API Virtualization:

• It lessens the risk to production API
• It speeds up time-to-delivery
• It reduces project costs

Lower costs imply a shorter approval process. It also makes the software lightweight, and thus easy to implement. There is also an ease of use and lesser employee training costs and time involved.

In a survey conducted, where the question asked was “What do you believe is the most important thing a company can accomplish in order to develop software quality?”, 4 out of the top 5 responses pointed to testing functionalities, specifically to the ones stated below:

• Unit testing
• Functional testing
• Continuous integration
• Integration testing

Service virtualization emphasizes that “Faster may not be always better”. It is not as effortless as ‘delivering content rapidly’ when it comes to enhancing an online buyer’s experience. The sequence, the design, the context, all need to be taken into consideration in which the content loads and curtail the usage of dynamic content without forgoing the user’s interest.

SmartBear’s API Readiness tool range is a force to reckon. Tools such as ServiceV Pro and Alert site, along with a whole array of other tools, offer various aspects of testing, such as:

1. API Load Testing
2. API Testing in Code
3. API Security Testing
4. Service Virtualization
5. API Functional Testing
6. API Performance Monitoring
7. Define, Build and Manage APIs

Conclusion

Cigniti is organizing a joint webinar with SmartBear on July 20th, 2016 on “Developing a Robust Testing Approach for Agile Transformation.” Register for the webinar to learn how to achieve better business outcomes by choosing TestComplete for successful test automation and how efficiently you can migrate to TestComplete by using Cigniti’s migration tool.