Synthetic Monitoring
API TESTING SERIES
Continuous Integration (CI) for Application Program Interface testing (API testing) is an online platform monitoring practice that helps businesses provide consistently fast service to their customers. CI, a development practice that involves updating platform code in a shared repository multiple times a day, and API Testing, gauging the performance of API implementations, work well together. The two practices provide a constant feedback and implementation loop that guides the development process.
3 Critical Reasons to use Continuous Integration:
- Release Higher Quality API Updates Faster
- Know Your Platform’s Capabilities Immediately for Optimal API Testing
- Cut out the Red Tape and Streamline Your API Testing
Release Higher Quality API Updates Faster
CI testing provides your development team with the tools to “pinpoint and repair” weak and problematic spots in API design. This means your team can use the test information to find problems and immediately take action to address the identified issues. CI allows a team to quickly issue updates, fixes, and new features as soon as they are ready, while API testing streamlines the quality assurance process by helping developers quantify how much adjustments help or hurt performance.
When using CI, developers do not need to wait for a major update deployment to fix a problem. If the team gets an email from a customer saying a specific app page keeps locking up, the team can immediately dive into an investigation to resolve the issue. It’s a horrible experience to put bad code into production, but CI gives your team the ability to quickly revert bad changes when someone points out a problem with the update. The technique works alongside code deployment methods and can be automated for streamlined use.
Know Your Platform’s Capabilities Immediately for Optimal API Testing
API testing answers the question “How many concurrent users can a given web platform handle before the API performance drops?” Website and application updates can often change how well the API performs and alter the number of concurrent users the platform can support. Therefore, CI API testing can immediately alert your development team about performance changes and shine light onto the cause. When there is an indication of a developing performance problem, your team can opt to preemptively improve efficiency in future updates or look at scaling the infrastructure to compensate.
Cut out the Red Tape and Streamline Your API Testing
Website and application changes require retesting after implementation because the previous tests are no longer accurate. Apica’s load testing integrations capabilities streamline the process for apps and websites. CI for API testing also helps with the QA process so your development team can deploy updates faster without needing to worry as much about the updates killing performance. Developers can actually run the API tests on staging servers to catch problems before pushing updates live to the production servers.
However, poorly implemented CI for API testing practices run the risk of generating morale-crushing false positive results. Apica’s ZebraTester configuration addresses this issue by implementing algorithms that immediately identify false positive test results so your development team can save its collective ego and avoid wasting time addressing problems that don’t really exist.
Slow platform performance is one major way your business can lose customers to other platforms. CI for API testing is an excellent practice for maintaining customer satisfaction. If your business is looking to keep its online platform performance at its best, contact the experts at Apica today to find out more about CI for API testing.