How To Build An Awesome APIs Test Automation Framework

Your team has started to implement a whole set of APIs. While they seem powerful for the business, you have a new challenge to solve: testing them. Manual testing is fine for some cases, but you quickly need automation.

Implementing the right API test automation right requires structure to ensure its implementation. This is what a framework is about, providing a repeatable frame of reference to solve a set of problems.

In our case, we want to implement end-to-end API test automation aligned with the business requirements, additionally ensuring its accessibility, maintainability, and scalability.

This article shares the common characteristics of an end-to-end API test automation framework, highlighting its implementation within Cerberus Testing. The following points are covered:

• Why building an API Testing Framework?
• What is a valuable API Testing Framework?
• The personas and use-cases of an API Testing framework
• Build a reusable and scalable API library
• Implement tests in low-code with shared keywords
• Execute our APIs tests with speed and reliability
• Provide the necessary traceability and visibility
• Scale your API Testing leveraging the framework

Let’s start by aligning the why before entering in implementation details.

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Why building an API Testing Framework?

APIs stand for Application Programming Interfaces. They are the bridge to perform data exchanges and perform functions. The advent of distributed systems has drastically expanded the maturity and usage of APIs within organizations.

APIs are nowadays the cornerstone of business digitalization and digitization. They enable to build fast a user experience relying on ready-to-use backend services published as APIs. Similarly, they accelerated the capability of back-end services to be reused by composition.

The maturity of APIs has significantly progressed since its first file, RPC, and SOAP…