Testing a Web API for a Cybersecurity Solution

Reliable APIs are crucial for the performance and security of any software. To make sure your API works efficiently, it is important to apply relevant testing and quality assurance (QA) practicest. In this post, Apriorit experts share a seven-step web API testing strategy that we use for many years in our projects.

What is API testing?

API testing helps to check how APIs work and whether they meet functionality, reliability, performance, and security requirements.

Continuous testing of the API layer helps to verify the software’s business logic — the rules for user interactions with services, data, and functions.

Common API testing procedure usually includes:

• Sending requests to the API
• Validating the system’s responses against expected responses
• Checking data accuracy and data formats, HTTPS status codes, and error codes

How to check your API’s work

Here are the types of testing you can use to check your API’s work:

• Functional testing to check how an API works and whether it does exactly what it’s supposed to do
• Security testing to check an API against security requirements, particularly the work of authentication, permissions, and access controls
• Performance testing to determine an API’s responsiveness and stability under heavy workload
• Negative testing to check how an API responds to unexpected data input from users
• Load testing to see how an API handles excessive calls
• Documentation testing to check whether API documentation guides users easily and clearly

The key benefits of conducting API testing

API testing is a crucial part of every software development process, since it focuses attention on testing business logic, data responses, security, and performance bottlenecks.

Apriorit web API testing strategy

At Apriorit, we develop our own seven-step web API testing strategy. This approach was designed and continuously improved based on our experience with dozens of projects.

The basis for this testing algorithm was built during our work on a cybersecurity project that we’ve been successfully maintaining for the last 10 years.

API testing is a crucial part of every software development process, since it focuses attention on testing business logic, data responses, security, and performance bottlenecks. Also, check the full article in our blog where we provide practical example of testing web API for a cybersecurity solution.