We live in an API driven world. One upshot of this is that many applications must be tested at the API level, a reality not without complications. Fortunately, we at Appvance have engineered a great simplification to the challenges of API testing. It’s called the Appvance Services Workbench and comes as part of our Appvance IQ testing platform. This post speaks about the challenges of API testing and how they are surmounted with the AIQ Services Workbench.
API Testing Challenges
API-based systems often deal in voluminous calls, with variations that can run into the millions. API testing based on traditional platforms, like Postman, merely pass along the resulting complexity, meaning that the test suites become extremely unwieldy and therefore unmaintainable. That is because traditional platforms lack a sophisticated language and structure to simplify the complexities of API testing.
AIQ Services Workbench to the rescue
Our brilliant engineers at Appvance studied this problem, working closely with customers who need to test their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based systems, and came up with the AIQ Services Workbench.
It simplifies the challenges of API testing in several ways. First, it employs a sophisticated language that abstracts away the core complexities of API testing. Next, it employs Cartesian Mapped Data that uses simple CSV files to deal with complex conditionals. This brilliant capability replaces hundreds or thousands of conditionals that would be required with a traditional approach, as with Postman.
Last but not least, it provides well over one-hundred functions that can be called for testing purposes. These range from functions for Dynamo DB, Cookies, Mail Client, SQL Calls, OCR Support, Image Recognition, Mobile Calls, OS Screen Interaction, and many, many more.
Real World Success
One customer employs AIQ Services Workbench to test a complex system used in the insurance industry. Each of this customer’s clients has different products and features managed by the system. The variations reach to the millions! Services Workbench greatly simplifies this testing challenge by employing the Cartesian table feature. Further, it has the ability to compare the results from differing test runs, making it easy to identify when anomalous results occur, thereby removing the need for humans to pore through results looking for needles among the haystacks.
Easy Does It
AIQ Services Workbench is a must-have tool if you have an API-based system to test. It empowers developers, even as it dramatically simplifies the effort required to do API testing. It has already made a valuable contribution to customers in North America and Europe. If you are already using AIQ, check out Services Workbench. If you are new to Appvance, please contact us to discuss your needs and arrange for a demonstration.
Click here for a free demo of AIQ.
