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Buyer’s Guide: How to Choose an API Testing Automation Platform—And Why You Should Choose Qyrus
It’s about 200,000 years ago. A group of Neanderthals are sitting around a fire in what is now central Italy.And they do something outrageously clever.- They invent the world’s first glue.*
It’s easy to dismiss glue as inconsequential, especially when juxtaposed against mankind’s other great inventions such as the wheel. But the ability to combine the two things is considered so critical that scholars regard the invention of glue as a significant sign of cognitive advancement. Here’s another way to explain the importance of glue: It came even before clothing (about 170,000 years ago), and just after the estimated origin of language (about 350,000 years ago).**
In the modern age, the importance of APIs—the digital equivalent of glue—is also just as high. How high? One Akamai study notes that API calls represent over 80 percent of all internet traffic.
It’s hard to argue over the importance of APIs, given how they’re the connective tissue that holds together so much of our digital environment—from applications architected with the smallest microservices to the most expansive Open ecosystems, such as Open Banking. Today, a significant majority of developers use APIs, and 40% of businesses monetize APIs, according to the State of APIs survey.
But there are a few hurdles impeding companies from fully realizing the benefits of APIs, and a lot of them have to do with testers.
Testers Grapple with APIs
For organizations to make the most of the benefits of APIs, their testers need to achieve a greater level of comfort with API testing and automation. Right now—primarily because of the current set of solutions available to them—many testers shy away from API testing. Their complaints fall, largely, into four categories:
Collaboration is Difficult
Most API testing platforms make it hard for testers to collaborate. Even though it’s become increasingly critical for testers to work in tandem with developers and other testers as organizations adopt shift-left strategies. This requires that QA engineers have common workspaces with developers, enabling both teams to engage and collaborate without unnecessary friction.
API Testing is Complex and Technically Demanding
Many testers start out with UI testing and are therefore accustomed to working with GUIs. As they try to adopt API testing, they are confronted with tools that only support command-line interfaces (CLI), require technical savvy to set up testing environments, and need a knowledge of JavaScript or other programming languages. These hurdles discourage testers from adopting API testing, even though it can be significantly more efficient that UI testing.
Management is a Burden
Traditional API testing tools are not easy to set up, manage, or monitor. This is exactly the opposite of what testers require as speed and efficiency become more important. API testers need features that facilitate everyday operations, enabling them to focus on increasing test coverage. For example, testers would benefit greatly if they could schedule tests without tiresome third-party integrations. Or if they could create a library of API tests that could be re-used or be imported from other platforms.
Scaling is Hard
If API testers could run multiple tests simultaneously, they would be able to boost their output significantly. However, many API testing tools are hosted on desktops which limits the ability of testers to parallel process and scale tests. Platforms which serve API testing solutions from the cloud are a solution.
How to Select the Right API Testing Platform
These challenges can be addressed with the right API testing automation platform—with ‘right’ being the operative word. The fact is that not all API testing automation platforms are built the same—which means you need to be extra diligent before you invest.
What would an ideal API testing platform look like? What criteria should it meet? Here’s a handy checklist.
Is it Easy to Deploy?
There’s little point in an API testing automation solution that takes months of effort to deploy. Here are two reasons why: It hurts speed-to-value and return on investment calculations; and it’s likely to be so complex that it becomes a victim of change management.
Qyrus’ cloud-based API testing solution ensures that getting started is both fast and easy. Testing teams can go from zero to executing their first API test with assertions in under just 10 minutes.
Does it Offer No-Code Assertions?
Assertions—such as those that validate status codes or response headers, for example—are a critical part of API testing. But, often creating assertions calls for complex scripting, which can bog down testing teams. This is where no-code assertions can help.
Qyrus is the only testing service provider that offers codeless API testing. Its graphical, point-and-click interface, combined with drop-down menus requires no scripting. This minimizes API testing automation complexity, thereby lowering dependence on time-intensive UI testing. Testing with Qyrus is 40% more efficient than existing code-based API systems.
How Simple is it to Use and Manage?
It goes without saying that the more user-friendly an API Testing Solution is, the greater the probability it will be used extensively, increasing both speed of delivery and coverage. Qyrus’ platform is built ground up to simplify testing. It goes further than other testing solutions to ease the jobs of testers with native plugins for the most popular CI pipelines such as Jenkins, Azure DevOps, TeamCity, Circle CI, BitRise, and more.
Additionally, it provides scheduling features without the hassle of third-party integrations and enables testing teams to import existing collections from other platforms such as Postman or Swagger.
To boost the efficiency and output of testers, Qyrus also offers parameterized, data-driven tests, which allow testers to upload Excel sheets and minimize the drudgery of manually testing against multiple parameters. Plus, all tests on Qyrus can be re-used and shared.
Is API Service Virtualization Part of the Solution?
As organizations adopt Agile methodologies to improve their ability to deliver new products or features more quickly, it can get easy for scrum teams to be at different stages of completion. This makes end-to-end testing difficult. API service virtualization fixes that by allowing testing teams to simulate APIs and execute tests.
With Qyrus’ API Service Virtualization, testers can create mock services quickly and easily, enabling them to reduce dependencies on work-in-progress or unavailable APIs. This capability enables quality teams to mitigate delays, shift left, and test earlier, shrink time-to-market, and lower costs. With Qyrus service virtualization services, testers can build APIs without any code to suit their test ideas.
How Collaborative is the Platform?
Cross-functional Agile teams, DevOps practices, and shift-left strategies have all increased the dependencies between software development engineers and quality assurance teams. But this relationship can sometimes be adversarial, resulting in poor collaboration, which can significantly impact the speed and cost of delivering high-quality software.
Qyrus understands the need for API testers to collaborate extensively with developers, business users, and process owners. It facilitates teamwork with cloud-based, shared workspaces that enable effortless collaboration; easy-to-read-and-share reports; and native integration with Jira to raise and track tickets effortlessly.
Is the Solution Integrated and Scalable?
The aim of every business that operates in a digital environment should be to increase its software development and testing ACCESS (Agility. Coverage. Cost-Efficiency. Error-Free-Delivery. Speed. Security.)
Frequently, however, the platforms and tools that are supposed to support developers and testers impede them from achieving these goals. They offer siloed solutions, which often operate off local machines or desktops, which impinge heavily on an organization’s ability to scale and run tests, holistically, across multiple platforms.
Qyrus is different. It is powered by a cloud-based platform that’s designed to scale up and down seamlessly. Additionally, with Qyrus, quality teams can more efficiently test Web, Mobile and APIs with a single AI-powered platform that eliminates the need for time-consuming custom frameworks and test infrastructure. With Qyrus’ integrated SaaS platform, organizations can launch API tests quickly, easily onboard new users, reduce delays and overheads associated with hardware purchases and maintenance, and increase the availability and resilience of testing environments.
Many of the world’s largest organizations and most agile start-ups depend on Qyrus’ API Testing Platform. You should, too. Try it now!
Endnotes
** Timeline of Historic Inventions
