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. 2021 Aug 9;21(16):5375.
doi: 10.3390/s21165375.

Automated Specification-Based Testing of REST APIs

Ovidiu Baniaș  1 , Diana Florea  1 , Robert Gyalai  1 , Daniel-Ioan Curiac  1
Affiliations

Automated Specification-Based Testing of REST APIs

Ovidiu Baniaș et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

Nowadays, REpresentational State Transfer Application Programming Interfaces (REST APIs) are widely used in web applications, hence a plethora of test cases are developed to validate the APIs calls. We propose a solution that automates the generation of test cases for REST APIs based on their specifications. In our approach, apart from the automatic generation of test cases, we provide an option for the user to influence the test case generation process. By adding user interaction, we aim to augment the automatic generation of APIs test cases with human testing expertise and specific context. We use the latest version of OpenAPI 3.x and a wide range of coverage metrics to analyze the functionality and performance of the generated test cases, and non-functional metrics to analyze the performance of the APIs. The experiments proved the effectiveness and practicability of our method.

Keywords: OpenAPI 3.x; REST API; automatic test case generation; software testing; specification-based testing.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Applicability of REST API.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Test Coverage Model: Levels and Criteria [7].
Figure 3
Figure 3
System activities and actions (activity diagram).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Descriptive values for API parameters.
Figure 5
Figure 5
User input dialog example.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Structural description of the system (class diagram).
Figure 7
Figure 7
Path coverage.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Operation coverage.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Paths tested.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Operations tested.
Figure 11
Figure 11
Parameter coverage.
Figure 12
Figure 12
Status code coverage.
Figure 13
Figure 13
Content type coverage.
Figure 14
Figure 14
Response body property coverage.
Figure 15
Figure 15
Performance metric.
Figure 16
Figure 16
Overview statistics.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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