{"id":651,"date":"2015-10-23T07:01:58","date_gmt":"2015-10-23T13:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cigniti.com\/blog\/?p=651"},"modified":"2019-12-13T12:02:41","modified_gmt":"2019-12-13T06:32:41","slug":"api-testing-and-service-virtualization-by-specialist-qa-vendors-critical-success-factors-in-the-iot-and-digital-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cigniti.com\/blog\/api-testing-and-service-virtualization-by-specialist-qa-vendors-critical-success-factors-in-the-iot-and-digital-era\/","title":{"rendered":"API Testing and Service Virtualization by Specialist QA Vendors\u2013 Critical Success Factors in the IoT & Digital era"},"content":{"rendered":"

As global enterprises embark on meeting objectives related to being mobile first, with digital at the center of the business strategy in an IOT era, the demand for API testing and service virtualization by specialist QA vendors has become very important.<\/p>\n

A Gartner research report pegs the market for testing and service virtualization at around US$200 million and growing at a CAGR of 12%. Also Gartner estimates that the overall software testing tools market at $1.5 billion, with a 5% growth rate in 2014. However what goes underneath is the need for specialist QA vendors and independent software testing providers who can implement advanced API testing and Service virtualization solutions leveraging these tools.<\/p>\n

As the adoption of agile and SOA based applications are increasingly prevalent, it is forcing both software development and test organizations change their strategies, approaches, frameworks, and tools to be able to achieve a wider, more precise view of heterogeneous and complex system quality. In the same parlance Application-programming interface testing or otherwise famously called as API testing has further become very important.<\/p>\n

Shift Left and Do Early<\/strong><\/p>\n

Predominantly the paradigm shift that has resulted due to heavy lifting of applications driven by SOA which are dependent on service orchestrations, increased agile software development practices have resulted in moving away from the traditional performance and functional testing aspects. Instead it has resulted to be able to shift left your testing approach and has increased the effective need of early testing and most importantly more frequently. As a result it is very much possible to eliminate a lot of challenges in modern day\u2019s heterogeneous IT stack and applications developed by distributed teams as many software development life cycle activities can happen earlier and become parallel again.<\/p>\n

Leverage specialist testing \u2013 Do it early and Independently<\/strong><\/p>\n

Leveraging independent testing approaches, each system component of a team can be tested individually, separately in the context of its real environment. This also allows you not to be detailed by the issues that can surface later during integration, which obviously are highly expensive to fix. Also, while it comes to testing APIs or services, the testing team members can use a more rapid approach of having flexible method stubs that act as replications and near to close substitutes for dependent resources.<\/p>\n

Service Virtualization \u2013 The ultimate enabler<\/strong><\/p>\n

While the above contexts clearly ascertain the need to have speed and quality together, it is but natural to look for a solution that can productize and toolify the creation of stubs to mimic, simulate and replicate the functional behaviour of complex, interdependent services.<\/p>\n