As an organization grows, the body of code that needs to be regression tested constantly increases. However, to maintain high velocity and deliver new features, teams need to minimize the amount of manual regression testing. Eric Smith shares his lessons learned in automating RESTful API tests using JMeter, RSpec, and Spock. Gain insights into the pros and cons of each tool, take back practical knowledge about the tools available, and explore reasons why your shop should require RESTful automation as part of its acceptance test criteria. Many decisions must be made to automate API tests: choosing the platform; how to integrate with the current build and deploy process; and how to integrate with reporting tools to keep key stakeholders informed. Although the initial transition caused his teams to bend their traditional roles, Eric says that ultimately the team became more cross-functionally aligned and developed a greater sense of ownership for delivering a quality product.

1. !
!
W15$
Session!
6/24/2015! !
3:00!PM!
!
!
!
!
“Automate$REST$API$Testing”$$
Presented$by:$
Eric$Smith$
HomeAdvisor$
$
$
$
$
$
Brought$to$you$by:$
$
$
$
$
$
$
340!Corporate!Way,!Suite!300,!Orange!Park,!FL!32073!
888C268C8770!D!904C278C0524!D!sqeinfo@sqe.com!D!www.sqe.com!
!
!
!

2. !
!
!!!!! !
!!!!
Eric Smith is an agile evangelist software leader with more than fifteen years of experience
leading software teams in developing highly complex projects using risk-based, feedback-
driven processes. Eric strongly believes that a trust-based, purpose-driven culture produces
the best results. He has led software projects and process improvements across organizations
in the B2B, Big Data, web, and mobile application spaces. For the past eight years, Eric has
been leading software delivery teams for HomeAdvisor, focusing his work on the delivery of
new products and mobile application products.
Eric Smith
HomeAdvisor

3. Automate REST API Testing
1

4. 2
• Addressable Domain Resources
• Http Verbs acting on the resource
! GET
! POST
! PUT
! DELETE
• Stateless
• Semantic Response Codes
REST
Representational State Transfer

5. 3
• Express the behavior of the API
• Defined Success Cases
• Graceful Degradation
• Edge Cases
• Code Coverage
REST API Testing

6. 4
• Efficiency
• Completeness
• Open Interface
• Expect Failure
• Virtualize the API
Why Automate APIs
You never know how they are using you

7. 5
• Postman
• Jmeter
• SOA Test
• Cucumber
• Rspec - Ruby
• Spock - Groovy
Techniques
There’s more than one way to skin a cat

8. 6
Postman
There’s more than one way to skin a cat

9. 7
JMeter
Loop point and click

10. 8
SOA Test
Advanced Point and Click Testing supporting SOAP, etc

11. 9
Rspec
BDD Programming using a superset of the Ruby programing language

12. 10
Rspec
Automatically run post deploy via Jenkins

13. 11
Spock
BDD Programming using a superset of the Groovy programing language

14. 12
Spock
Automatically run post deploy via Jenkins with Surefire reports

15. 13
• Automated all of our REST API’s
• Jmeter: tests were run in jmeter manually
• Created API’s for a subset of business functions, primarily mobile apps.
• Limited resource familiar with running and building the tests.
What were we doing?
Independent Automation Team

16. 14
• Architecturally, the team was moving quickly to SOA based
development
• Since there was now several teams creating API and the same number
of people testing them something had to change.
• Developers were already writing tests to verify their code
• Tests weren’t being run automatically as part of the build process
Well what’s wrong with that?
Nothing absolutely nothing

17. 15
• Developers are lazy
• They don’t want to waste time
• They will automate things they have to do more than once
• Everyone was doing it differently
Writing Tests to Test the Tests
So development started writing automated tests

18. 16
• Developers are lazy
• Developers don’t have the knowledge of how to effectively write test
plans
• Their intentions were good but the tests they wrote didn’t cover the test
plan
• Their tests were not being incorporated into the build deploy process
Well what’s wrong with that?
Test plans need to be vetted

19. 17
• API errors from external services should degrade gracefully
• We need to be able to simulate unpredictable test cases
! Service Down
! Service Timeout
! Simulated Error
Testing the External API
Test plans need to be vetted

20. 18
• Software Developer
• Agile Evangelist
• Process Iterator
• Automated Tester
• Software Executive
• Father
• @ericrsmith
• esmith@homeadvisor.com
Who Am I?
Who who, who who