Published on 10/22/2021
Testing an application with integrations is a time consuming process and almost all applications today have integrations with other applications. Integrations come in many forms, a couple of most common examples are:
- Integration between front-end (web or mobile) application with one or more back-end server applications
- Integrations between two or more server-side applications
If there are integrations then there is a good chance that some of those integrations are done using REST APIs utilizing the HTTP protocol.
To test the integration between the application systems, it is essential that:
- All Systems participating in the integration are running normally.
- The System responsible for providing the test data has the data or you have access to that System and you have working knowledge of that System so that you can create the test data yourself.
Your testing activity will come to a stop if the System providing the data is unavailable or inaccessible to you.
In some cases, all your application is looking for is a signal from another application with which it is integrated. If the other application is unavailable then you are forced to first find a way to work-around the situation before continuing with your work.
A few additional problems faced when testing integrated applications are:
- The system providing the data does not have enough data.
- The data being provided does not cover all scenarios.
- Data has to be modified directly by going into the data providing application and the changes need to be reset before every test and changes need to be rolled back to avoid corrupting the test data.
- Modifying the data directly in the data providing application could be time consuming and repeating this process before running each test slows down the testing activity.
- Some scenarios are difficult, if not impossible, to produce in test environments.
We think that one of the ways to solve the problems described above is replacing the real APIs with virtual APIs. Virtual APIs can be used to:
- Continue the work when the real APIs of the data providing system are unavailable
- Easily provide the data to the application being tested without needing to re-create, reset or modify the data in the data providing system
- The data providing system is inaccessible or creating test data requires specialized working knowledge of the data providing system
Virtual APIs can also help in maintaining a set of responses covering important scenarios, including error conditions and responses. The application that needs the data can be diverted to virtual APIs and the virtual API server can provide the application with the pre-defined set of responses, expediting the testing process if it seems fit given the situation.
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