Application Programming Interface (API) Ecosystem spurs digital transformation. It creates an open-source and encourages the providers and the users to work together to develop and deliver a service ensuring complete customer satisfaction. API ecosystem allows the developers to retrieve data for developing a web application by connecting to a remote server. Through API, applications can exchange data with each other.

An API ecosystem is ideally a framework where an API leads to other APIs enhancing the capability of an organization to plan a strategy and manage its resources during the software development lifecycle. A healthy API ecosystem allows the developers to understand the organizational strategies and develop the digital product specially tailored to fit their requirements. API ecosystem, hence, becomes crucial to evaluate the success of the digital strategy of an organization.

To build a healthy API ecosystem, organizations must treat APIs as offerings so that they invest in them. To access the APIs, developers would require registration, documentation, consoles, sandboxes, mock test, and sample code. A carefully planning and designing based on understanding the requirements of API users can help eliminate the problems.  

What is API testing?

To ensure that the API meets the requirements for performance, usability, dependability, security and functionality, API testing is done. Testing for the APIs is done using the layer messages, which is critical as APIs in these instances act as the fundamental interface for an application and need to be logically correct. 

API testing ensures whether APIs respond correctly to every request. To protect from possible security threats, developers work with all aspects of APIs learning from failures and unexpected inputs as well as sending out responses on time. They also check for the response of API as an open-source after being extracted from the edge cases.

Why API testing is so important to building a healthy API ecosystem?

For a more compelling experience, the API ecosystem expands by establishing new connections. Therefore, launching an API would need a clear understanding of the business model. A business may offer thousands of services to its customers, but only the most relevant ones that define their business structure can be included in the API ecosystem.

An API must reflect the value of a business effort and determine how it can enhance the customer experience. Any effort of adapting an API without learning thoroughly about it would fail to add value to a business. API testing helps in detecting bugs in the system within the development timeline. It allows users to resolve discrepancies and ensure application security.

With organizations moving towards self-contained microservice architecture, they are adapting API to be able to deploy faster. API ensures steady and easy interaction between different datastores and controls the sections with ease. The effectiveness of the API ecosystem can be determined with API testing only.

API testing has a quick turnaround and is cost-efficient reducing time-to-market. API is the growing focus of organizations, which enables the front-end and back-end developers and testers together to take responsibility for API testing. They are looking forward to accelerating ROI and product launch by slashing down the testing time.  

The API lifecycle and its evolution  

The first step to establishing an ecosystem would be to promote an API. It is essential to maintain high-quality API documentation and productivity tools to offer well-designed portals to the developers.

API evolution is based on the requirements that the developers would want to access through various channels. Whether your audiences are single constituency or group constituencies, you can reach them through different communication channels, not just confining its portal’s web address or may also use any third-party platform for sharing the API codes on a wide scale.  

How to ensure the success of API testing?

There are two types of web services for the web API i.e., SOAP and REST, and the developers need to be aware of these two before they start testing the APIs. Having a clear output status is the basic requirement for API testing, wherein, the most important indicator is the response status code. API testing requires you to organize your tasks so that you are ready for the next step.

Conclusion

The contract between the user server and provider determines the API. Both these applications interact with each other to share the data. API testing helps to ensure that the data shared between the applications are secured and validated. API testing is a continuous process that helps in detecting and resolving system vulnerabilities before the end-users need to deal with the changes.

API testing helps in checking the functionality, performance, and security of the API. It checks the request-response combination against a pre-defined set of data combinations. API testing needs the right testing tools along with defining the right testing parameters.

At Yethi, we understand that with an increasing number of applications operating on Cloud platforms using ‘as-a-service’ business models you need stable and secure functioning APIs. As the importance of API testing grows in near future, we are following a constant innovation to help you reduce the testing time of your applications, so that you keep up with your commitments of launching your products quick in the market and stay ahead of your competition.

With years of experience and expertise in quality assurance of business applications, we combine the best of traditional testing with modern functional and security testing to ensure the functionality and security of APIs. We have developed a library of more than half-a-million test cases, which also include used cases like UPI and lending. From Tenjin to a SaaS-based testing platform, we have moved a level up in testing and innovation. Today we automate your end-to-end software testing cycle along with request and response configuration for APIs.