Is that defect reproducible?

 Published on 10/23/2021

Reproducibility of the defect is important to:

  • Develop a fix for the defect
  • Re-test the defect after the fix has been applied
  • And certify that the defect has been successfully fixed

It is also important that the defect is reproducible in non-production environments, such as QA and Development.

Inability to reproduce the problem consistently in the same environment OR

Not having identical data (that exposes the defect in the application) in the lower environments makes it difficult to prepare and deploy the defect fix.

Before the development team can begin working on a fix, data must be created, copied or migrated into the lower environments. However, copying the data into another environment isn’t always straight forward because of the dependencies and relationships between objects that make up the data being copied.

If the data that exposes the defect in the application is obtained by calling a Web/HTTP/REST API then knowing the contents of the API response might be sufficient to reproduce the problem.

Even if the API response body contents are fully known, how is that sufficient to reproduce the problem in the same or lower environments?

We can utilize API Virtualization services to create a virtual API that is identical to original API. The application affected by the defect can call the virtual API to receive the exact data that exposes the flaw, because virtual APIs can be instructed to return specific responses when invoked. Having a virtual API can help reproduce the problem in the lower environments and the developers can begin working on the fix instead of waiting for the data team to finish migrating the needed data into the lower environments. Depending on the application architecture, virtual APIs can speed-up fix development by eliminating the need to reset or recreate the test data repeatedly because virtual APIs can return the needed data to the calling application consistently.

If you would like to talk about a specific scenario and if Api-On-Cloud's Virtual APIs can be useful for your use-case then contact us at info@apioncloud.com