With the ever-increasing variations in the software requirements coupled with the rapid pace of change, the need to transform applications from monoliths to diversified and micro-modular is imperative. APIs and Microservices have emerged as the instruments to facilitate this change in the digital world and ensuring their quality is becoming more critical than ever. Superior quality can be assured only with extensive, continuous, and on-time software testing, to make sure the application performs as it should, and validates set specifications. Software testing is also crucial for application security, revealing vulnerabilities that can put the application and the user’s data at risk.

The cost of defects is directly proportional to the stage they are found in the development life cycle. The delay in identifying discrepancies or worse yet, after the application has been deployed — can lead to expensive fixes and lost customers, and huge penalties in some cases.

Software testing, however, takes time, and with the rapidly growing software development methodologies and environments, it becomes difficult to manually test everything for an application keeping time and cost constraints in mind.

And that’s where Test Automation comes in. Incorporating test automation is the first step towards achieving goals that include saving time, proactive input, improving accuracy and efficiency, increasing test coverage, and increasing team ownership of testing. In this blog, we dive deep into why a majority of our Test Automation solutions for our clients involve using a single framework to run complex tests on API protocols.

Before we get into the ‘why’, let us understand what some of these protocols are. Specifically, REST, SOAP, & GraphQL as a majority of our clients have APIs that are built on these specific protocols.

From the figure above, we infer that although all three are used to create API architecture, they have some major differences starting with their nature. SOAP is a protocol, REST is an architectural style, while GraphQL, as its name suggests, is a query language. A major conceptual difference between the three protocols is that SOAP performs operations representing logic, while REST and GraphQL operate with resources representing data.

Why Single Framework?

The technology used to build the application largely depends on multiple factors like customer requirements, resource availability, established environments, etc. all of which apply to the business layer communication as well.

Therefore, for an automation testing team, it becomes very cumbersome to adapt to a new tool or technology or hire a new resource in a limited time to automate the Business layer. Not to mention, the cost incurred.

By using a single framework, it is possible to nullify the above challenges due to the following benefits –

• High reusability – Having a single framework throughout your delivery pipeline increases efficiency and optimizes test automation.
• Lower maintenance – A single framework means having a single validation point for your API and UI tests, making test maintenance infinitely easier.
• Reducing time and cost – Single framework helps reduce the training time for the new tools and resources, and this will also help to reduce the cost by reducing the time.
• Scaling up – the same team can adapt easily to any kind of applications the business layer may develop.
• Enhanced performance – Performance is improved since API tests can run before, after, or in the middle of UI tests without having to have both applications running.

Salient features of our Single Framework Test Automation solution-

1. Automates REST, SOAP, and GraphQL transactions.
2. Create correlation across the transactions.
3. Create required assertions as per the requirements.
4. Export the project in a .zip file.
5. Platform Independent (can run/execute in any platform).
6. Can execute same test cases multiple times as iterations.
7. Can use any input data such as Excel, CSV, config, etc.
8. Can export the data from the database as input.
9. Customized reports in HTML
10. Reports contain dashboard, iterations information, and the request/ response.
11. The report includes assertion details to validate the status.

Test Automation Process

A quick glimpse into our Customized Reports:

a) Dashboard

b) Request and Response

Although setting up test automation frameworks takes time and effort, in the long run automating the testing process will provide a high return of significant time savings, cost and of course, quality applications.

Case Study – Health and Human Services Client

Opteamix successfully implemented an API automation framework for a large US-based Health and Human Services client who required protocols like REST, SOAP and GraphQL to be supported by a single framework. After an extensive assessment of the client’s requirements, we came up with a single framework robust enough to test transactions and collections on all specified protocols.

The solution provided correlated the field values as per the dependency and included assertions as well. The framework supported customized reports that give the user exact insight into the application health.

This framework suite has been in use for a long time, with a high rate of success across multiple implementations.