Comments on: API Testing: Testing in Layers

By: I.M. Testy › Scary Stories and GUI Automation

I.M. Testy › Scary Stories and GUI Automation — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:35:37 +0000

[...] parsing errors, calculation problems, etc.) while testing through the UI. But, as indicated in my previous post, well-designed software is usually built in layers and a good many of the ‘functional’ issues [...]

By: Mark Koltnuk

Mark Koltnuk — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:16:55 +0000

Hi!
I’m an API testing engineer at SAP and i’ve encoutered with some interesting (open source!) UI test application about 2 months ago called – “Selenium” – which has .NET and Java api’s – give it a try… enjoy.

[Bj's Reply] Hi Mark, Personally I am not a huge fan of GUI automation mostly because it is misused in an attempt to emulate a user or to tunnel through the layers in an attempt to find functional bugs at the API layer. But, I have looked at Selenium and it seems to be a pretty good framework for GUI automation and it is gaining a lot of traction. Another popular GUI automation framework is White on http://codeplex

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:21:03 +0000

Great to see they are actually teaching this kind of testing at College these days.
Once everyone has a handle on this kind of functional testing it would be well worth people’s while to look into an API that will be more similar to that they are likely to find in the real-world. e.g. Hitting a database, communicating with some other external third party API, performing IO, Integrating with some other system/service.

Teaching students the value and benefit of being able to test their own code makes such a fundamental change to the way they can learn, and also write software.

Bj’s Reply – there are several college’s and universities that are expanding their curriculum to include testing and I am very glad to see it also. It seems the industry is coming full circle again to the ideal of “Test, then code” as expressed by B. Hetzel and D. Gelperin in 1987 and now revived in the Agiile and XP models. I suspect this might drive the industry to require more from CS grads in the sense that not only can they solve challenging problems and develop algorithmic solutions, but can also develop better unit tests to drive quality upstream.

By: Devon Smith

Devon Smith — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:54:56 +0000

Hi! As a UW grad myself (‘06!)I was excited to hear that you teach there. I do a lot of testing work with APIs now, but have had trouble finding a good automation program. Are there any programs you recommend for API testing?

Bj’s Reply – Hi Devon, Go Huskies! At Microsoft we built a few internal API harnesses and they saw some success in some groups. I can’t think of any commercially available generic API test harnesses. I suspect this is the case because once we get beyond testing a single component or API and start looking at dependencies we need to develop the mocks and/or stubs. One of my mentee’s at Microsoft built a test framework (http://emtf.codeplex.com/) for unit testing that might provide some benefit or at least provide a platform to expand on.

By: The Morning Brew - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #531

The Morning Brew - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #531 — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:34:47 +0000

[...] API Testing: Testing in Layers – Bj Rollison presents the case for functional testing at the API level as a key way of identifying functional problems in the application, and how we don’t have to just test at the end user level. [...]