APIs have become the center of software development, connecting and transferring data across systems and applications. Luckily, testing them can greatly improve the efficiency of your test strategy as a whole, helping you deliver software faster than ever. API testing is an essential part of the software development process, and it’s important to have a team that can work together to create accurate and efficient tests.
SmartBear’s 2021 State of Software Quality Survey showed that:
- 70% of respondents have a formal API testing process.
- Larger organizations tend to have more formal processes in place.
- Many smaller organizations plan to develop a formal testing process, highlighting the importance that developers place on API quality.
- Collaboration and governance processes are key to successful API development and testing outcomes.
The survey also highlighted some of the biggest obstacles to ensuring API quality in organizations:
- Lack of integration continues to be a challenge for teams.
- Many teams lack a standard framework for collaboration.
- Collaboration for teams building microservices is critical.
By collaborating on API test creation, teams can improve the quality of the tests, speed up the development process, and deliver a better product. Some benefits of collaborating during API test creation include:
- Improved quality: Collaboration allows multiple team members to review and test the API, which can help identify and fix bugs and issues more quickly and efficiently.
- Increased efficiency: Collaboration allows team members to share knowledge and expertise, which can help to speed up the development process and reduce the chances of errors.
- Better documentation: Collaboration allows team members to share their understanding of the API, which can help to improve the documentation and make it more accurate and useful.
- Faster development: Collaboration allows team members to work on different parts of the API tests simultaneously, which can help to speed up the development process.
- Better communication: Collaboration allows team members to share their progress and ask questions about the API tests, which can help to improve communication and reduce misunderstandings.
- Better decision making: Collaboration allows team members to share their ideas and perspectives, which can help to make better decisions about the design and implementation of the API tests.
Collaboration best practices
It is considered a good practice to store tests and test projects in source control. This way, you can easily work on your tests along with your teammates, share your test cases, revert changes, and so on. A Git-based workflow can be used to facilitate collaboration in API test creation by allowing multiple team members to work on the tests simultaneously while ensuring that the tests are well organized and versioned.
ReadyAPI allows teams to create, manage, and execute automated functional, security, and performance tests in one centralized interface – accelerating API quality for Agile and DevOps software teams. It supports Git repositories located in repository-hosting systems like GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket, and Git repositories that reside on servers in your local network.
Recommendations for a Git-based workflow
- Use a test repository: A Git repository is created to store the API tests. This repository contains all the test project files, test scripts, test data, and test results.
- Use branching: Team members can create branches for different features, bug fixes, or versions of the tests. This allows them to work on the tests independently without interfering with each other’s work.
- Use push and pull requests: Team members can submit their changes to the tests by creating push and pull requests. This allows other team members to review the changes and provide feedback before they are merged into the main branch.
- Automate with continuous integration: The tests can be automated and run as part of a continuous integration pipeline. This allows the team to automatically run the tests and detect any issues early in the development process. ReadyAPI supports automation through TestRunners from local desktops or using TestEngine for more centralised test execution.
- Use collaborative editing: ReadyAPI also has the capability for team members to collaborate on the same test project. This way different team members can work on the test project at the same time without interfering with each other's work.
ReadyAPI includes built-in support for Git repositories. This lets you put your test project files into and get them from a Git repository directly from within the ReadyAPI UI, without using any third-party tool. What can you do with ReadyAPI and Git integration? Once your project is in the repository, you use the Git panel or menu commands to work with it. You can:
- Commit changes to Git repository
- Discard changes
- Push changes to or pull changes from Git repository
- Switch branches
- View commit history
- View remote changes
- View and create tags
- Work from Git console
By using a Git-based workflow, teams can collaborate effectively on the creation of API tests while keeping the tests well organized and versioned. This approach helps teams to improve the quality of their tests, speeds up the development process, and reduces the chances of errors.
For more information about collaboration and Git for API test creation, check out our latest webinar series on API collaboration best practices.